HCC: Small: Understanding and Supporting Communication Across Language Boundaries

计算机媒介通信(CMC)工具和社交媒体有可能使人们能够跨越国界流畅地互动，但语言边界仍然对交流构成挑战。机器翻译(MT)和其他技术的进步导致了新的工具，这些工具可以让人们使用他们的母语进行交流，但当在会话环境中使用机器翻译时，翻译错误会造成相当大的误解。这项拟议的研究的目的是通过使用其他信息来增强机器翻译输出，如关键词突出显示或图片表征，从而更好地理解和支持说不同母语的人之间的交流。为了实现这一目标，该项目将：(A)探索机器翻译与英语的使用如何影响语言间的沟通和协调；(B)反复开发和测试新的工具，以提供更多的含义表征，以消除机器翻译输出中的差距；以及(C)在一系列精心控制的实验室研究中，评估这些增强的机器翻译工具在沟通和协作方面的价值。结果将有助于勾勒出新的语际交流工具的设计和技术空间。该项目将通过开发关于人们如何利用技术跨越语言边界进行沟通和合作的新理论和理解，为计算机中介通信和计算机支持的合作工作领域做出贡献。它将通过开发提高机器翻译产出的新技术和工具，为人机交互和相关领域作出贡献。实验中生成的带标注的语际对话也将丰富机器翻译系统的发展。最后，这项工作将探索围绕实时关键字突出显示和多语言图片检索的新技术问题。该项目还将为跨语言交流提供新的工具和知识，供研究界和公众广泛使用，从而提高人们在跨语言边界、在全球组织和在个人一级、在社交网站和其他国际形式的新媒体上与他人互动的能力。

Computer-mediated communication (CMC) tools and social media have the potential to allow people to interact fluidly across national boundaries but linguistic boundaries still pose challenges to communication. Advances in machine translation (MT) and other technologies have resulted in new tools that could allow people to communicate with one another using their native language, but translation errors create sizeable misunderstandings when MT is used in conversational settings. The goal of the proposed research is to better understand and support communication between people who speak different native languages by enhancing MT output with other information, such as keyword highlighting or pictorial representations. To achieve this goal, the project will (a) explore how the use of MT vs. English affects inter-lingual communication and coordination; (b) iteratively develop and test new tools that provide additional representations of meaning to smooth gaps in MT output; and (c) assess the value of these enhanced MT tools for communication and collaboration in a series of carefully controlled laboratory studies. The results will help delineate the design and technical space for new tools for inter-lingual communication. The project will contribute to the fields of computer-mediated communication and computer-supported cooperative work by developing new theories and understandings of how people use technology to communicate and collaborate across language boundaries. It will contribute to human-computer interaction and related fields through the development of new techniques and tools for enhancing the output of machine translation. The annotated inter-lingual dialogues generated in experiments will also enrich the development of machine translation systems. Finally, the work will explore new technical issues around real-time keyword highlighting and multilingual picture retrieval. The project will also provide new tools and knowledge for communication across language boundaries that will be made widely available to the research community and general public, thus improving people's ability to engage with others across language boundaries, in global organizations and at the personal level, on social network sites and other international forms of new media.