Efficient Search for Interactive Statistical Machine Translation

The goal of interactive machine translation is to improve the productivity of human translators. An interactive machine translation system operates as follows: the automatic system proposes a translation. Now, the human user has two options: to accept the suggestion or to correct it. During the post-editing process, the human user is assisted by the interactive system in the following way: the system suggests an extension of the current translation prefix. Then, the user either accepts this extension (completely or partially) or ignores it. The two most important factors of such an interactive system are the quality of the proposed extensions and the response time. Here, we will use a fully fledged translation system to ensure the quality of the proposed extensions. To achieve fast response times, we will use word hypotheses graphs as an efficient search space representation. We will show results of our approach on the Verbmobil task and on the Canadian Hansards task.