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Quality of Thai to English Machine Translation

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Knowledge Management and Acquisition for Intelligent Systems (PKAW 2016)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 9806))

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Abstract

This paper presents the experimental results of several approaches to machine translation evaluation to determine the quality of Thai to English translation. We compare automatic metrics and human-based evaluation that includes error classification, reading comprehension and analysis from a professional translator. The research compares translation systems that are available to end users in Thailand to provide an understanding of the quality of translation in general use. Both the rate of 47.2 % error words per text and the BLEU score of 0.21 indicate the difficulty of Thai to English translation. Despite a high error rate for the translations, users were able to successfully answer about 60 % of the questions using the output of the machine translation systems in the reading comprehension tests.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Information Technology, International College, Payap University, Chiang Mai, Thailand

    Séamus Lyons

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  1. Séamus Lyons
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Correspondence to Séamus Lyons .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Tokyo University of Science , Noda, Japan

    Hayato Ohwada

  2. University of Tsukuba, Tokyo, Japan

    Kenichi Yoshida

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© 2016 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

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Lyons, S. (2016). Quality of Thai to English Machine Translation. In: Ohwada, H., Yoshida, K. (eds) Knowledge Management and Acquisition for Intelligent Systems . PKAW 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9806. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-42706-5_20

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-42706-5_20

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-42705-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-42706-5

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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