Paper submitted to the Machine Translation Summit

As I mentioned in previous posts, I developed (with tremendous help from Adam Zacharski) a cross-language instant messaging system using Adobe Flex. This system provides concurrent real-time translation for instant messaging using multiple machine translation engines. During this last academic year, Bill Ogden, my colleague in New Mexico, and several people in his lab (Sieun An and Yuki Ishikawa) used this system to evaluate the performance of machine translation systems based on how effective they were in helping people accomplish shared tasks. They used paid participants who worked in pairs (one Japanese speaker paired with a native English speaker) to accomplish a photo identification task using this instant messaging system. We just submitted a paper describing the results of this work to the Machine Translation Summit in Ottawa in August.