ACCEPT : Automated Community Content Editing PorTal

The use of machine translation (MT) is becoming much more pervasive. At the same time, Web 2.0 paradigms are democratising content creation - stressing the value of communities of users creating content for each other. However, right now these two trends are fairly incompatible. MT engines, even statistical engines, cannot produce acceptable results for community content due to the extreme variability within the content.

The ACCEPT project will address this issue by developing new technologies designed specifically to help MT work better in this environment. The approach consists of three main avenues of research and development:

• new paradigms for “minimally intrusive” preediting content;
• the development of strategies for post-editing content which, rather than fully relying on trained translators, will also leverage the monolingual skills of volunteer domain experts;
• the use of the insights gained in the editing process and using innovative text analytics to improve the statistical MT engines themselves.

The project brings together two of the world’s leading research centres in applied MT (Universities of Edinburgh and Geneva), as well as the leading provider of content editing technologies (Acrolinx). In addition, there are two extremely experienced machine-translation users in the project: the software company Symantec and the language services provider Lexcelera. Symantec and Lexcelera will also bring their community forum experience: Symantec through its user forums and Lexcelera through Traducteurs sans Frontières, a non-profit organisation supported by Lexcelera which provides pro bono humanitarian translations via a community of translators.

The ACCEPT project will be coordinated by the University of Geneva, represented by Prof. Pierrette Bouillon, Vice-Doyenne of the Faculty of Translation and Interpreting and Dr Violeta Seretan, senior researcher.