A tool to study machine interpreting (beta)
M.INTerpreting is an Open Source tool designed to study machine interpreting (for example our own MI engine) especially, but not only, from a communicative perspective. Machine interpreting, or speech to speech translation, is an emerging field of Artificial Intelligence which has gained a lot of interest recently. Research in this area has been technology centered and driven so far. This project aims at extending the focus of research, supporting scholars from the humanities (primarely interpreting studies) in doing experimental research in the area of machine interpreting. Thanks to its open architecture the tool can also be used to perform research in the area of human-centric Computer-Assisted Interpreting, for example in sight-consecutive (computer-assisted consecutive), or similar areas.
The tool is desgined for conducting experimental studies by (almost) non tech-people, yet preserving a certain degree of freedom in how the tool works (different to out-of-the box MT/MI solutions, like Google interpreter).
It works on cascading systems and it integrates a set of standard resources for ASR, MT and STT, but other resources can be easily integrated.
API for different resources can be easily implemented and integrated in the tool. Customizable in terms of resources (ASR, MT, TTS, etc.) and in the way they interact with each other.
The tool is designed for use in experimental settings with normal computers. However, it can also be used on Windows tablets (Surface) for studying user-machine interactions.
There is no single workflow or setting. The open structure allows to design new settings and scenarios.
The source code, available on GitHub, is released as open source and can be changed and adapted with some knowledge in the Perl programming language.
M.INTerpreting is not a plug-and-play speech translation tool (even if it easy enough to have it up and running). It has been designed for scholars to perform controlled experiments with MI. A spin-off of M.INTerpreting is our MI engine for conference interpreting you can try here.
In a nutshell, with Version 1 you need a computer as a receiver and a computer as a sender. On the receiver, you install MINTerpreting. On the receiver you set the tool and listen to the interpretation. You use the sender as a microphone. The microphone user interface is opened in Google Chrome.
To use the tool, you need to initialize a session. This will set up the server connection for you (the tool needs to connect to our server).
This tool has been created by Interpreting and NLP scholar Dr. Claudio Fantinuoli at the University of Mainz in Germersheim under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License (CC BY 3.0)
I hope you find this tool useful.
Feel free to get in touch if you have any questions or suggestions.
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