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<Paper uid="C00-2154">
  <Title>WebDIPLOMAT: A Web-Based Interactive Machine Translation System</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1. Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> The World Wide Web (Berners-l,ee, 11989) seems to be all ideal environment for machine translation: it is easily accessible around the world using freely-available, easy-to-use tools which are ava.ilable to persons speaking a. nlyriad of langua.ges, all of whom would like to I)e able to communicate with one another without language barriers. IlL. is therefore not too surl)rising that a few companies have attempted to make machine translation available in this medium (AltaVista, 1999; FreeTranslation, 1.q99; hlt.erTran, 1999). '.l'he l)riinary use identified for these tra.nslators has been that of translating Web pages or amusing oneself with the inadequa.cies of ma.dfine translation (Yang and l,ange, 1998). What these systems cannot be used for is real-time, speech-to-speech communication with translation.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> l{eal-time communication over the hiternet has more properly been the (lomain of '&lt;chat&amp;quot; l)rotoeels: primarily Interact Relay Chat (11{(3) (Oikarinen and Reed, 1993), and similar instant messaging protocols developed commercially (America Online Inc., 2000; Microsoft Corp., 2000; ICQ Inc., 1999).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> While some portals have been developed to permit access to chat using the Web (iTRiBE lnc., 1996), the primary point of access seems to be chat-specific client software. Although chat defines protocols and provides infrastructure, it is limited ill the kind of data that it can transl)ort, and client software is tightly focussed oil the text domain. Such limitations have not, however, prevented researchers fi'om exl)erilnenting with the possibilities of incorporating machine translation or speech into tile chat experience (1,enzo, 1998; Seligma.n et al., 1998). The outcome of these experiments has been to show that comn-mrcial machine translation systems may 1)e reasonably integrated into the chat room, and that commercial speech software ca.n be connected to existing chat software to provide the desired experience.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> We have taken a difl~rent road. It has been noted (Seligman, 19.(.)7; l&amp;quot;rederking et al., 2000) that broad-coverage machine translation and speech recognition cannot now be usefld mdess users can interact with the system to improve results. While Seligman et al. (1998) were able to etDct user editing of speech recognition by editing text before submitting it for translation, they were unable to do the same for tile translation system, prilnarily due to limitations of commercial software. Additional limitations are encountered in the communication medium: chat is not amenable to non-text interaction with translation agents, and commercial chat software does not, in any case, support such interaction.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> To deal with these limitations, we have developed a fully interactive, Web-based, chat-style tra.nslation system, supporting sl)eech recognition and synthesis, local-or third-1)arty correction of speech reeognitioi, and machine translation, and online learning, which ca.n be used with nothing lllore than a Well browser and some simple add-ons. All intensive processing, including translation and speech recognition is performed a.t central servers, permitting access for those with limited computational resources. In a.ddition, tile modular design of t.he system and interface permit computa.tional tasks to be easily distributed and different dialog configurations to be explored.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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