Multimodal interactive machine translation

Abstract

Interactive machine translation (IMT) [1] is an alternative approach to machine translation, integrating human expertise into the automatic translation process. In this framework, a human iteratively interacts with a system until the output desired by the human is completely generated. Traditionally, interaction has been performed using a keyboard and a mouse. However, the use of touchscreens has been popularised recently. Many touchscreen devices already exist in the market, namely mobile phones, laptops and tablet computers like the iPad. In this work, we propose a new interaction modality to take advantage of such devices, for which online handwritten text seems a very natural way of input. Multimodality is formulated as an extension to the traditional IMT protocol where the user can amend errors by writing text with an electronic pen or a stylus on a touchscreen. Different approaches to modality fusion have been studied. In addition, these approaches have been assessed on the Xerox task. Finally, a thorough study of the errors committed by the online handwritten system will show future work directions.