Interactive Models for Post-Editing

Abstract

Despite the increasingly good quality of Machine Translation (MT) systems, MT outputs require corrections. Automatic Post-Editing (APE) models have been introduced to perform these corrections without human intervention. However, no system has been able to fully automate the Post-Editing (PE) process. Moreover, while numerous translation tools, such as Translation Memories (TMs), largely benefit from translators' input, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) remains limited when it comes to PE. This research-in-progress paper discusses APE models and suggests that they could be improved in more interactive scenarios, as previously done in MT with the creation of Interactive MT (IMT) systems. Based on the hypothesis that PE would benefit from HCI, two methodologies are proposed. Both suggest that traditional batch learning settings are not optimal for PE. Instead, online techniques are recommended to train and update PE models on the fly, via either real or simulated interactions with the translator.

OpenTIPE: An Open-source Translation Framework for Interactive Post-Editing Research

“…Instead of fully automating the post-editing task, Escribe and Mitkov (2021) suggest that postediting would greatly benefit from human-centered approaches that leverage the post-editor's corrections and their interactions with the translation interface. For example, APE models could improve over time by incrementally learning from human corrections (Chatterjee et al, 2017).…”

“…While human-computer interaction has been explored in MT with the help of translation frameworks such as CASMACAT (Alabau et al, 2013), there is no such interactive environment designed for the post-editing task (do Carmo et al, 2020;Escribe and Mitkov, 2021). Therefore, current research in Interactive Post-Editing (IPE) is limited to simulate the human interaction by feeding pre-existing corrections to the post-editing process sequentially (Ortiz-Martínez and Casacuberta, 2014;Chatterjee et al, 2017;Negri et al, 2018a).…”