Lost in Interpretation: Predicting Untranslated Terminology in Simultaneous Interpretation

Nikolai Vogler, Craig Stewart, Graham Neubig


Abstract
Simultaneous interpretation, the translation of speech from one language to another in real-time, is an inherently difficult and strenuous task. One of the greatest challenges faced by interpreters is the accurate translation of difficult terminology like proper names, numbers, or other entities. Intelligent computer-assisted interpreting (CAI) tools that could analyze the spoken word and detect terms likely to be untranslated by an interpreter could reduce translation error and improve interpreter performance. In this paper, we propose a task of predicting which terminology simultaneous interpreters will leave untranslated, and examine methods that perform this task using supervised sequence taggers. We describe a number of task-specific features explicitly designed to indicate when an interpreter may struggle with translating a word. Experimental results on a newly-annotated version of the NAIST Simultaneous Translation Corpus (Shimizu et al., 2014) indicate the promise of our proposed method.
Anthology ID:
N19-1010
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)
Month:
June
Year:
2019
Address:
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Editors:
Jill Burstein, Christy Doran, Thamar Solorio
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
109–118
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/N19-1010
DOI:
10.18653/v1/N19-1010
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Nikolai Vogler, Craig Stewart, and Graham Neubig. 2019. Lost in Interpretation: Predicting Untranslated Terminology in Simultaneous Interpretation. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers), pages 109–118, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Lost in Interpretation: Predicting Untranslated Terminology in Simultaneous Interpretation (Vogler et al., NAACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/N19-1010.pdf
Code
 nvog/lost-in-interpretation