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Towards a Better Human-Machine Collaboration in Statistical Translation : Example of Systematic Medical Reviews. (Vers une meilleure collaboration humain-machine en traduction statistique : l'exemple des revues systématiques en médecine)

Machine Translation (MT) has made significant progress in the recent years and continues to improve. Today, MT is successfully used in many contexts, including professional translation environments and production scenarios. However, the translation process requires knowledge larger in scope than what can be captured by machines even from a large quantity of translated texts. Since injecting human knowledge into MT is required, one of the potential ways to improve MT is to ensure an optimized human-machine collaboration. To this end, many questions are asked by modern research in MT: How to detect where human assistance should be proposed? How to make machines exploit the obtained human knowledge so that they could improve their output? And, not less importantly, how to optimize the exchange so as to minimize the human effort involved and maximize the quality of MT output? Various solutions have been proposed depending on concrete implementations of the MT process. In this thesis we have chosen to focus on Pre-Edition (PRE), corresponding to a type of human intervention into MT that takes place ex-ante, as opposed to Post-Edition (PE), where human intervention takes place ex-post. In particular, we study targeted PRE scenarios where the human is to provide translations for carefully chosen, difficult-to-translate, source segments. Targeted PRE scenarios involving pre-translation remain surprisingly understudied in the MT community. However, such PRE scenarios can offer a series of advantages as compared, for instance, to non-targeted PE scenarios: i.a., the reduction of the cognitive load required to analyze poorly translated sentences; more control over the translation process; a possibility that the machine will exploit new knowledge to improve the automatic translation of neighboring words, etc. Moreover, in a multilingual setting common difficulties can be resolved at one time and for many languages. Such scenarios thus perfectly fit standard production contexts, where one of the main goals is to reduce the cost of PE and where translations are commonly performed simultaneously from one language into many languages. A representative production context - an automatic translation of systematic medical reviews - is the focus of this work. Given this representative context, we propose a system-independent methodology for translation difficulty detection. We define the notion of translation difficulty as related to translation quality: difficult-to-translate segments are segments for which an MT system makes erroneous predictions. We cast the problem of difficulty detection as a binary classification problem and demonstrate that, using this methodology, difficulties can be reliably detected without access to system-specific information. We show that in a multilingual setting common difficulties are rare, and a better perspective of quality improvement lies in approaches where translations into different languages will help each other in the resolution of difficulties. We integrate the results of our difficulty detection procedure into a PRE protocol that enables resolution of those difficulties by pre-translation. We assess the protocol in a simulated setting and show that pre-translation as a type of PRE can be both useful to improve MT quality and realistic in terms of the human effort involved. Moreover, indirect effects are found to be genuine. We also assess the protocol in a preliminary real-life setting. Results of those pilot experiments confirm the results in the simulated setting and suggest an encouraging beginning of the test phase.