Is MT Ready for the Next Crisis or Pandemic?

Communication in times of crisis is essential. However, there is often a mismatch between the language of governments, aid providers, doctors, and those to whom they are providing aid. Commercial MT systems are reasonable tools to turn to in these scenarios. But how effective are these tools for translating to and from low resource languages, particularly in the crisis or medical domain? In this study, we evaluate four commercial MT systems using the TICO-19 dataset, which is composed of pandemic-related sentences from a large set of high priority languages spoken by communities most likely to be affected adversely in the next pandemic. We then assess the current degree of ``readiness'' for another pandemic (or epidemic) based on the usability of the output translations.

An Interdisciplinary Approach to Human-Centered Machine Translation

Machine Translation (MT) tools are widely used today, often in contexts where professional translators are not present. Despite progress in MT technology, a gap persists between system development and real-world usage, particularly for non-expert users who may struggle to assess translation reliability. This paper advocates for a human-centered approach to MT, emphasizing the alignment of system design with diverse communicative goals and contexts of use. We survey the literature in Translation Studies and Human-Computer Interaction to recontextualize MT evaluation and design to address the diverse real-world scenarios in which MT is used today.

Capturing divergence in dependency trees to improve syntactic projection

Obtaining syntactic parses is a crucial part of many NLP pipelines. However, most of the world's languages do not have large amounts of syntactically annotated corpora available for building parsers. Syntactic projection techniques attempt to address this issue by using parallel corpora consisting of resource-poor and resource-rich language pairs, taking advantage of a parser for the resource-rich language and word alignment between the languages to project the parses onto the data for the resource-poor language. These projection methods can suffer, however, when the two languages are divergent. In this paper, we investigate the possibility of using small, parallel, annotated corpora to automatically detect divergent structural patterns between two languages. These patterns can then be used to improve structural projection algorithms, allowing for better performing NLP tools for resource-poor languages, in particular those that may not have large amounts of annotated data necessary for traditional, fully-supervised methods. While this detection process is not exhaustive, we demonstrate that common patterns of divergence can be identified automatically without prior knowledge of a given language pair, and the patterns can be used to improve performance of projection algorithms.