Fuzzy-Match Repair Guided by Quality Estimation

IEEE Trans Pattern Anal Mach Intell. 2022 Mar;44(3):1264-1277. doi: 10.1109/TPAMI.2020.3021361. Epub 2022 Feb 3.

Abstract

Computer-aided translation tools based on translation memories are widely used to assist professional translators. A translation memory (TM) consists of a set of translation units (TU) made up of source- and target-language segment pairs. For the translation of a new source segment s', these tools search the TM and retrieve the TUs (s,t) whose source segments are more similar to s'. The translator then chooses a TU and edit the target segment t to turn it into an adequate translation of s'. Fuzzy-match repair (FMR) techniques can be used to automatically modify the parts of t that need to be edited. We describe a language-independent FMR method that first uses machine translation to generate, given s' and (s,t), a set of candidate fuzzy-match repaired segments, and then chooses the best one by estimating their quality. An evaluation on three different language pairs shows that the selected candidate is a good approximation to the best (oracle) candidate produced and is closer to reference translations than machine-translated segments and unrepaired fuzzy matches ( t). In addition, a single quality estimation model trained on a mix of data from all the languages performs well on any of the languages used.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms*
  • Language
  • Translating*
  • Translations