Wikipedia and Machine Translation: killing two birds with one stone

Iñaki Alegria, Unai Cabezon, Unai Fernandez de Betoño, Gorka Labaka, Aingeru Mayor, Kepa Sarasola, Arkaitz Zubiaga

LREC Workshop on Free and Open-Source Language Resources for the Machine Translation of Less-Resourced Languages. 2014.

In this paper we present the free/open-source language resources for machine translation created in OpenMT-2 wikiproject, a collaboration framework that was tested with editors of Basque Wikipedia. Post-editing of Computer Science articles has been used to improve the output of a Spanish to Basque MT system called Matxin. For the collaboration between editors and researchers, we selected a set of 100 articles from the Spanish Wikipedia. These articles would then be used as the source texts to be translated into Basque using the MT engine. A group of volunteers from Basque Wikipedia reviewed and corrected the raw MT translations. This collaboration ultimately produced two main benefits: (i) the change logs that would potentially help improve the MT engine by using an automated statistical post-editing system, and (ii) the growth of Basque Wikipedia. The results show that this process can improve the accuracy of a Rule Based Machine Translation system in nearly 10% benefiting from the post-edition of 50,000 words in the Computer Science domain. We believe that our conclusions can be extended to MT engines involving other less-resourced languages lacking large parallel corpora or frequently updated lexical knowledge, as well as to other domains.