Many applications within natural language processing involve performing text-to-text transformations, i.e., given a text in natural language as input, systems are required to produce a version of this text (e.g., a translation), also in natural language, as output. Automatically evaluating the output of such systems is an important component in developing text-to-text applications. Two approaches have been proposed for this problem: (i) to compare the system outputs against one or more reference outputs using string matching-based evaluation metrics and (ii) to build models based on human feedback to predict the quality of system outputs without reference texts. Despite their popularity, reference-based evaluation metrics are faced with the challenge that multiple good (and bad) quality outputs can be produced by text-to-text approaches for the same input. This variation is very hard to capture, even with multiple reference texts. In addition, reference-based metrics cannot be used in production (e.g., online machine translation systems), when systems are expected to produce outputs for any unseen input. In this book, we focus on the second set of metrics, so-called Quality Estimation (QE) metrics, where the goal is to provide an estimate on how good or reliable the texts produced by an application are without access to gold-standard outputs. QE enables different types of evaluation that can target different types of users and applications. Machine learning techniques are used to build QE models with various types of quality labels and explicit features or learnt representations, which can then predict the quality of unseen system outputs. This book describes the topic of QE for text-to-text applications, covering quality labels, features, algorithms, evaluation, uses, and state-of-the-art approaches. It focuses on machine translation as application, since this represents most of the QE work done to date. It also briefly describes QE for several other applications, including text simplification, text summarization, grammatical error correction, and natural language generation.

Post-editing is possibly the oldest form of human-machine cooperation for translation. It has been a common practice for just about as long as operational machine translation systems have existed. Recently, however, there has been a surge of interest in post-editing among the wider user community, partly due to the increasing quality of machine translation output, but also to the availability of free, reliable software for both machine translation and post-editing. As a result, the practices and processes of the translation industry are changing in fundamental ways. This volume is a compilation of work by researchers, developers and practitioners of post-editing, presented at two recent events on post-editing: The first Workshop on Post-editing Technology and Practice, held in conjunction with the 10th Conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas, held in San Diego, in 2012; and the International Workshop on Expertise in Translation and Post-editing Research and Application, held at the Copenhagen Business School, in 2012.

The dream of automatic language translation is now closer thanks to recent advances in the techniques that underpin statistical machine translation. This class-tested textbook from an active researcher in the field, provides a clear and careful introduction to the latest methods and explains how to build machine translation systems for any two languages. It introduces the subject's building blocks from linguistics and probability, then covers the major models for machine translation: word-based, phrase-based, and tree-based, as well as machine translation evaluation, language modeling, discriminative training and advanced methods to integrate linguistic annotation. The book also reports the latest research, presents the major outstanding challenges, and enables novices as well as experienced researchers to make novel contributions to this exciting area. Ideal for students at undergraduate and graduate level, or for anyone interested in the latest developments in machine translation.

The second international conference on INformation Systems Design and Intelligent Applications (INDIA – 2015) held in Kalyani, India during January 8-9, 2015. The book covers all aspects of information system design, computer science and technology, general sciences, and educational research. Upon a double blind review process, a number of high quality papers are selected and collected in the book, which is composed of two different volumes, and covers a variety of topics, including natural language processing, artificial intelligence, security and privacy, communications, wireless and sensor networks, microelectronics, circuit and systems, machine learning, soft computing, mobile computing and applications, cloud computing, software engineering, graphics and image processing, rural engineering, e-commerce, e-governance, business computing, molecular computing, nano computing, chemical computing, intelligent computing for GIS and remote sensing, bio-informatics and bio-computing. These fields are not only limited to computer researchers but also include mathematics, chemistry, biology, bio-chemistry, engineering, statistics, and all others in which computer techniques may assist.

This is the first volume that brings together research and practice from academic and industry settings and a combination of human and machine translation evaluation. Its comprehensive collection of papers by leading experts in human and machine translation quality and evaluation who situate current developments and chart future trends fills a clear gap in the literature. This is critical to the successful integration of translation technologies in the industry today, where the lines between human and machine are becoming increasingly blurred by technology: this affects the whole translation landscape, from students and trainers to project managers and professionals, including in-house and freelance translators, as well as, of course, translation scholars and researchers. The editors have broad experience in translation quality evaluation research, including investigations into professional practice with qualitative and quantitative studies, and the contributors are leading experts in their respective fields, providing a unique set of complementary perspectives on human and machine translation quality and evaluation, combining theoretical and applied approaches.

Trends in E-Tools and Resources for Translators and Interpreters offers a collection of contributions from key players in the field of translation and interpreting that accurately outline some of the most cutting-edge technologies in this field that are available or under development at the moment in both professional and academic contexts. Particularly, this volume provides a wide picture of the state of the art, looking not only at the world of technology for translators but also at the hitherto overlooked world of technology for interpreters. This volume is accessible and comprehensive enough to be of benefit to different categories of readers: scholars, professionals and trainees. Contributors are: Pierrette Bouillon, Gloria Corpas Pastor, Hernani Costa, Isabel Durán-Muñoz, Claudio Fantinuoli, Johanna Gerlach, Joanna Gough, Asheesh Gulati, Veronique Hoste, Amélie Josselin, David Lewis, Lieve Macken, John Moran, Aurelie Picton, Emmanuel Planas, Éric Poirier, Victoria Porro, Celia Rico Pérez, Christian Saam, Pilar Sánchez-Gijón, Míriam Seghiri Domínguez, Violeta Seretan, Arda Tezcan, Olga Torres, and Anna Zaretskaya.