CDI-Type I: Translation as a Collaborative Process

自然语言翻译仍然是一个昂贵、开发解决方案缓慢、难以扩展的关键问题。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，完全自动化的高质量翻译仍然遥不可及。现在出现了各种各样的项目，这些项目利用了愿意帮助翻译的基于网络的社区，但是与志愿者的全部可用性相比，双语专家是相当罕见的。这个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）的结合是否可以产生高质量的翻译。该研究是围绕一个迭代协议的开发组织起来的，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，受到信息论和话语分析概念的启发。该研究框架将支持人类参与者之间的同步和异步配对交互，以及允许真正分布式人类计算的“任务包”方法。就更广泛的影响而言，该项目是第一个研究涉及非双语人类参与者的混合人/机器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。要开发的技术将在一个现实问题上进行评估：国际儿童数字图书馆项目（先前由美国国家科学基金会资助）（www.childrenslibrary.org）的图书翻译。ICDL目前包含60种语言的4000本图书，拥有活跃的用户群，其中包括1000名有不同语言技能的志愿者，他们对帮助翻译感兴趣。墨西哥、罗马尼亚、蒙古和美国的参与者将作为K-12教育环境的早期采用者，支持ICDL通过这一现有和不断增长的资源促进更广泛的文化交流的目标。

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.