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<Paper uid="A00-1019">
  <Title>Unit Completion for a Computer-aided Translation System</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> TRANSTYPE is part of a project set up to explore an appealing solution to Interactive Machine Translation (IMT). In constrast to classical IMT systems, where the user's role consists mainly of assisting the computer to analyse the source text (by answering questions about word sense, ellipses, phrasal attachments, etc), in TRANSTYPE the interaction is directly concerned with establishing the target text.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Our interactive translation system works as follows: a translator selects a sentence and begins typing its translation. After each character typed by the translator, the system displays a proposed completion, which may either be accepted using a special key or rejected by continuing to type. Thus the translator remains in control of the translation process and the machine must continually adapt its suggestions in response to his or her input. We are currently undertaking a study to measure the extent to which our word-completion prototype can improve translator productivity. The conclusions of this study will be presented elsewhere.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> The first version of TrtANSTYPE (Foster et al., 1997) only proposed completions for the current word. This paper deals with predictions which extend to the next several words in the text. The potential gain from multiple-word predictions can be appreciated in the one-sentence translation task reported in table 1, where a hypothetical user saves over 60% of the keystrokes needed to produce a translation in a word completion scenario, and about 85% in a &amp;quot;unit&amp;quot; completion scenario.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> In all the figures that follow, we use different fonts to differentiate the various input and output: italics are used for the source text, sans-serif for characters typed by the user and typewriter-like for characters completed by the system.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> The first few lines of the table 1 give an idea of how TransType functions. Let us assume the unit scenario (see column 2 of the table) and suppose that the user wants to produce the sentence &amp;quot;Ce projet de loi est examin~ ~ la chambre des communes&amp;quot; as a translation for the source sentence &amp;quot;This bill is examined in the house of commons&amp;quot;. The first hypothesis that the system produces before the user enters a character is loi (law). As this is not a good guess from TRANSTYPE the user types the first character (c) of the words he or she wants as a translation.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> Taking this new input into account, TRANSTYPE then modifies its proposal so that it is compatible whith what the translator has typed. It suggests the desired sequence ce projet de Ioi, which the user can simply validate by typing a dedicated key. Continuing in this way, the user and TRANSTYPE alternately contribute to the final translation. A screen copy of this prototype is provided in figure 1.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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