Framework
Development of a linguistic framework for a communication-oriented analysis of machine interpreting
A communicative approach to exploring
Machine Interpreting in conference settings
In recent years, speech translation has gained momentum thanks to the swift advances in artificial intelligence. The dramatic improvements in the quality of automatic transcription and interlingual translation have led to the developement of experimental and commercial applications for use in non-professional and semi-professional environments, and they are expected to enter professional settings at some point in the near future. National and international institutions, for example, are currently looking at the implementation of such technologies to support multilingual communication.
Speech translation has the potential to increase the communicative inclusion of both people with hearing impairment, learning disabilities and cognitive restrictions as well as of people that do not share the language of the community they are living in.
Empirical investigation on machine interpreting has so far mostly been conducted within the framework of computer science, for instance with the goal of improving the current widely used cascading approach to speech-to-speech translation, or of exploring the potential of end-to-end systems. So far, investigations have been technology-centred and evaluation has been conducted with the goal of measuring improvements over time and developments cycles.
What is still missing is a communicative approach to the analysis and evaluation of machine interpreting as an agent of multilingual communication. The projects has at least three broad are of interest:
These are the areas that we want to cover with our project.
Within our project we are developing a baseline translation system (cascading system).
The project is funded by the Mainzer Inneruniversitäre Forschungsförderung
Development of a linguistic framework for a communication-oriented analysis of machine interpreting
Creating a corpus and a methodology to test MI from a communicative prospective
Analysis of fundamental phenomena of machine interpreting (completeness, adequacy, reception, etc.)
Investigating potentials and limitations of machine interpreting in complex contexts and authentic institutional communicative situations (parliamentary debates, bilateral meetings, etc.).
Overcome the limited understanding of the nature of risks related to the uninformed use of MI and of the wider implications of using this technology (for example in terms of ethical issues)
Evaluating MI not only against perfect standards but also against real human interpretation performed on the same dataset
While first attempts at a communication-oriented investigation of MI in the field of dialogue interpreting are already available, the application of MI to conference interpreting remains completely unexplored. Our project aims at filling this research gap by addressing the phenomenon in the field of conference interpreting (both simultaneous and consecutive) from a communicative perspective.
We want to achieve this by combining the humanities with computer science.
Feel free to get in touch with us if you have any questions or suggestions.