MTriage: Web-enabled Software for the Creation, Machine Translation, and Annotation of Smart Documents

Progress in the Machine Translation (MT) research community, particularly for statistical approaches, is intensely data-driven. Acquiring source language documents for testing, creating training datasets for customized MT lexicons, and building parallel corpora for MT evaluation require translators and non-native speaking analysts to handle large document collections. These collections are further complicated by differences in format, encoding, source media, and access to metadata describing the documents. Automated tools that allow language professionals to quickly annotate, translate, and evaluate foreign language documents are essential to improving MT quality and efficacy. The purpose of this paper is present our research approach to improving MT through pre-processing source language documents. In particular, we will discuss the development and use of MTriage, an application environment that enables the translator to markup documents with metadata for MT parameterization and routing. The use of MTriage as a web-enabled front end to multiple MT engines has leveraged the capabilities of our human translators for creating lexicons from NFW (Not-Found-Word) lists, writing reference translations, and creating parallel corpora for MT development and evaluation.