On June 10-11, 2010, the University of Maryland hosted a Workshop on Crowdsourcing and Translation. Originally put together in connection with a project on collaborative translation, the goal was to bring together a set of people whose work is helping to define this new and exciting area, and to create an opportunity for discussions that will help define its future directions.

1. Translation as a Collaborative Activity Benjamin B. Bederson & Philip Resnik Computer Science Department Human-Computer Interaction Lab Department of Linguistics Computational Linguistics and Information Processing Lab University of Maryland

2. Languages on Internet by Population Source: Global Reach, Internet World Stats

3. International Children’s Digital Library www.childrenslibrary.org

4. A real-world problem: ICDL Now 4,386 books 54 languages Some translations in a few languages 49,420 adults, 29,102 children registered ~100K unique visitors/month Goal 10,000 books 100 languages Every book in every language!

5. Machine Translation (MT) (餐厅= restaurant, dining hall) Large volume, cheap, fast Unreliable quality

6. Professional Translators High quality, but slow and expensive (even for common language pairs)

7. Amateur Translators

8. The key idea

9. Translation with the Crowd Translate with the MonolingualCrowd vs. 75,000 contributors Wikipedia: 800 translators

10. Machine Translation Monolingual Human Participation Affordability Amateur Bilingual Human Participation Professional Bilingual Human Participation Quality

11. Monolingual translation protocol Original source sentence Noisy target hypothesis F0 E0 MT Monolingual post-editing Fluent target hypothesis Noisy back translation E1 MT F1 HTER editing F2 Fluent, accurate E2 MT Et cetera…

12. Monolingual translation protocol Each participant is performing a monolingual task: Infer partner’s intended meaning as well as possible Express that meaning grammatically in own language Source language participant has extra constraint: Expressed meaning must match source sentence Conflict? Original meaning wins

13. Three Types of Errors detectable and correctable Tout le monde doit entendre l'histoire de Cendrillon. MT Everybody must to hear story about Cinderella Monolingual post-editing Everybody must hear the story about Cinderella

14. Three Types of Errors detectable but not correctable Tout le monde doit entendre l'histoire de Cendrillon. MT Everybody must heard the business by Cinderella Monolingual post-editing ?

15. Three Types of Errors not detectable Tout le monde doit entendre l'histoire de Cendrillon. MT Everybody loves the story about Cinderella

16. Enrich Translations Increase redundancy and shared context … … to help make detectable errors correctable … to help make undetectable errors detectable

17. MT

18. MT MT

19. MT MT MT enrichment

20. MT MT MT enrichment MT

21. MT MT MT enrichment MT

24. Web link Image Mark ok Mark problematic

25. Preliminary validation of the protocol Language pair: Russian to Chinese Hard case: no orthographic cues Easy to find local volunteers Two Russian speakers and four Chinese speakers Four Russian-Chinese translation pairs (Russians twice) One hour per pair Worked on 44 sentences (6 pages), finished 28 = ~8.5 minutes per sentence (~1 word per minute) N.B. average translators: ~2500 words per 8hr day (= ~5 words per minute)

26. Google Translate …

27. … Monotrans

28. Ishida, Lin and colleagues at Kyoto University Department of Social Informatics have independently developed a very similar back-and-forth protocol.In their protocol, there is no enrichment to increase redundancy: if the target participant cannot make sense of the whole sentence, he or she requests that the entire original sentence be rephrased.

29. Global Internet User Population Source: http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats7.htm

30. Announced a Popular Movement for the Liberation of Sudan to withdraw its candidate in the presidential elections scheduled in April this as confirmation of the leaders in the movement. اعلنتالحركةالشعبيةلتحريرالسودانسحبمرشحهافيالانتخاباتالرئاسيةالمقرراجراؤهافينيسان/ابريلالجاري،حسبتاكيداتلقياديينفيالحركة. Announced SPLM withdraw its candidate in the presidential elections in April by assurances to leaders in the movement. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8597996.stm

32. Do I really need to worry about this?

33. With some things, it’s very hard to say no.

34. Monolingual post-editing Callison-Burch (2005)

35. Enriching context Pplrrllygdtgttngmstfthmnngrght, vnfrmdfcnt txt. {minus,weak,deficient}

36. One more observation The original source sentence is not the only way the intended meaning could have been expressed. Suppose this phrasing is difficult to translate correctly a restaurant close by Perhaps one of these alternatives can be more successful

37. Polls indicate Brown, a state senator, and Coakley, Massachusetts’ Attorney General, are locked in a virtual tie to fill the late Sen. Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat Les sondagesindiquent Brown, un s ´enateurd’ ´ etat, et Coakley, Massachusetts’ Procureurg´en´eral, sontenferm´ esdansunecravatevirtuel `a remplir le regrett´es ´enateur Ted Kennedy’s si`ege au S´enat. Polls indicate Brown, a state senator, and Coakley, Massachusetts’ Attorney General, are locked in a virtual tie to fill the late Sen. Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat Les sondagesindiquent Brown, un s´enateurd’ ´ etat, et Coakley, Massachusetts’ Procureurg´en´eral, sontenferm´esdansunecravatevirtuel `a remplir le regrett´es´enateur Ted Kennedy’ssi`ege au S´enat. Polls indicate that Brown, a state senator, and Coakley,the Attorney General of Massachusetts, are locked in a virtual tie to fill the Senate seat of the Sen. Ted Kennedy, who died recently. Les sondagesindiquentque Brown, un s ´ enateurd’ ´ etat, et Coakley, le procureurg ´en´eral du Massachusetts, sontenferm´ esdansunecravatevirtuelpourvoir le sige au S´enat de Sen. Ted Kennedy, qui estd´ ec´ed´er´ecemment

39. Automatically determining where the errors are NP NP PP F visit Jupiter to was the Pluto-bound new horizons spacecraft probe The most recent Mismatches? D S F’ visit Jupiter was the Pluto-bound new horizons spacecraft The latest research MT MT the most recent probe to visit jupiterwas the pluto-bound new horizons spacecraft E

40. the press trust of india quoted the government minister for relief and rehabilitation kadam kadam, the government’s relief and rehabilitation minister (2/3) the government minister concerned with relief and rehabiliationkadam (1/3) as revealing today that in the last week, the monsoon has started in all of india’s states one every one of india’s state, one (3/3) each of India’s states one (2/3) all states of india one (1/3) after another, and that the financial losses and casualties have been serious in all areas. just in maharashtra, the state which includes mumbai, india’s largest city, india's largest city, mumbai (3/3) the largest city in India, Mumbai, (3/3) mumbai, the largest city of india, (3/3) the number of people known to have died who died (3/3) identified to have died (2/3) known to have passed away (2/3) has now reached 358. For 31% of the sentences in an English-to-Chinese experiment, at least one new version of the sentence leads to better translation. Often the gains are quite substantial.

41. Polls indicate Brown, a state senator, and Coakley, Massachusetts’ Attorney General, are locked in a virtual tie to fill the late Sen. Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat Les sondagesindiquent Brown, un s ´enateurd’ ´ etat, et Coakley, Massachusetts’ Procureurg´en´eral, sontenferm´ esdansunecravatevirtuel `a remplir le regrett´es ´enateur Ted Kennedy’s si`ege au S´enat. Polls indicate Brown, a state senator, and Coakley, Massachusetts’ Attorney General, are locked in a virtual tie to fill the late Sen. Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat Les sondagesindiquent Brown, un s´enateurd’ ´ etat, et Coakley, Massachusetts’ Procureurg´en´eral, sontenferm´esdansunecravatevirtuel `a remplir le regrett´es´enateur Ted Kennedy’ssi`ege au S´enat. Polls indicate that Brown, a state senator, and Coakley,the Attorney General of Massachusetts, are locked in a virtual tie to fill the Senate seat of the Sen. Ted Kennedy, who died recently. Les sondagesindiquentque Brown, un s ´ enateurd’ ´ etat, et Coakley, le procureurg ´en´eral du Massachusetts, sontenferm´ esdansunecravatevirtuelpourvoir le sige au S´enat de Sen. Ted Kennedy, qui estd´ ec´ed´er´ecemment

42. Where to from here? Larger and more formal validation of the protocol Exploring the space of richer annotations Reconsidering UI for: Ease of use Throughput Parallel, multi-person contribution Exploring the space of automatic and human error detection and paraphrase

43. Collaborators and Sponsors Chang Hu CS Ph.D. student Olivia Buzek CS/Linguistics undergrad Alex Quinn CS Ph.D. student Yakov Kronrod Linguistics Ph.D. student