HCC: Small: Understanding and Supporting Communication Across Language Boundaries

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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.