CDI-Type I: Translation as a Collaborative Process

自然语言翻译仍然是一个至关重要的问题，成本高昂，开发解决方案缓慢，难以扩展。 虽然自动化方法通常可以理解要点，但对于世界上绝大多数语言来说，全自动高质量翻译仍然遥不可及。现在出现了各种各样的项目，利用基于网络的社区，人们愿意帮助翻译，但双语专业知识是相当罕见的相比，总的志愿者。 该项目将调查机器翻译和只说一种语言的人类参与者（即，单语者）可以产生高质量的翻译。 这项研究是围绕一个迭代协议的开发组织的，该协议结合了机器翻译、人工和半自动语言注释以及人工纠正的元素，其动机是信息论和话语分析中的概念。 该研究框架将支持人类参与者之间的同步和异步成对交互，以及允许真正分布式人类计算的“任务袋”方法。 在更广泛的影响方面，该项目是第一个调查涉及非双语人类参与者的混合人/机翻译潜力的项目之一，将实际实施与经验驱动的实验相结合。如果成功，该项目将降低自然语言翻译的门槛，从而形成一种广泛可用的方法，为前所未有的广泛语言对提供高质量的翻译，同时降低双语专业知识的要求和成本。 将根据一个现实世界的问题对即将开发的技术进行评估：（以前由国家科学基金会资助的）国际儿童数字图书馆项目（www.childrenslibrary.org）内的书籍翻译。 ICDL目前包含60种语言的4，000本图书，拥有活跃的用户群，包括1，000名具有不同语言技能的志愿者，他们有兴趣帮助翻译。 来自墨西哥、罗马尼亚、蒙古和美国的参与者将作为K-12教育环境中的早期采用者，支持ICDL通过这一现有和不断增长的资源实现更大的共享文化理解的目标。

Natural language translation remains a crucial problem that is expensive, slow to develop solutions for, and difficult to scale. While automated approaches often result in understanding the gist, fully automated high quality translation remains far out of reach for the vast majority of the world's languages. A variety of projects are now emerging that tap into the Web-based community of people willing to help translate, but bilingual expertise is quite rare compared to the total availability of volunteers. This project will investigate whether a combination of machine translation and human participants that speak only a single language (i.e., monolingual speakers) can result in high quality translation. The research is organized around development of an iterative protocol that combines elements of machine translation, human and semi-automated language annotation, and human correction, motivated by concepts in information theory and discourse analysis. This research framework will support both synchronous and asynchronous pairwise interaction among human participants as well as a "bag of tasks" approach that permits truly distributed human computation. With respect to broader impacts, this project is among the first to investigate the potential of hybrid human/machine translation involving non-bilingual human participants, combining practical implementation with empirically driven experimentation. If successful, this project will lower the bar for translation of natural languages, resulting in a widely available approach offering high quality translation for an unprecedentedly wide range of language pairs while reducing requirements and costs for bilingual expertise. The technology to be developed will be evaluated on a real-world problem: translation of books within the (previously NSF-funded) International Children's Digital Library project (www.childrenslibrary.org). The ICDL currently contains 4,000 books in 60 languages and has an active user population including 1,000 volunteers with differing language skills who are interested in helping with translation. Participants in Mexico, Romania, Mongolia, and the U.S. will act as early adopters in K-12 educational settings, supporting the ICDL's goal of enabling greater shared cultural understanding through this existing and growing resource.