The first Automatic Translation Memory Cleaning Shared Task

• Published in: Machine translation Vol. 30; no. 3/4; pp. 145 - 166
• Main Authors: Barbu, Eduard, Escartín, Carla Parra, Bentivogli, Luisa, Negri, Matteo, Turchi, Marco, Orasan, Constantin, Federico, Marcello
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Dordrecht Springer 01-12-2016; Springer Netherlands; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Artificial Intelligence; Cleaning; Computational Linguistics; Computer memory; Computer Science; Machine translation; Natural Language Processing (NLP); Polls & surveys; Translations; Translators; Translation memories; Translation memory cleaning; Natural language processing
• ISSN: 0922-6567; 1573-0573
• DOI: 10.1007/s10590-016-9183-x

This paper reports on the organization and results of the first Automatic Translation Memory Cleaning Shared Task. This shared task is aimed at finding automatic ways of cleaning translation memories (TMs) that have not been properly curated and thus include incorrect translations. As a follow up of the shared task, we also conducted two surveys, one targeting the teams participating in the shared task, and the other one targeting professional translators. While the researchers-oriented survey aimed at gathering information about the opinion of participants on the shared task, the translators-oriented survey aimed to better understand what constitutes a goodTM unit and inform decisions that will be taken in future editions of the task. In this paper, we report on the process of data preparation and the evaluation of the automatic systems submitted, as well as on the results of the collected surveys.