Post-Editing Machine Translation (PEMT) is an important and necessary step in the Machine Translation process. KantanMT is releasing a new, simple and easy to use PEX rule editor, which will make the post-editing process more efficient, saving both time, costs and the post-editors sanity.
As we have discussed in earlier posts, PEMT is the process of reviewing and editing raw MT output to improve quality. The PEX rule editor is a tool that can help to save time and cut costs. It helps post-editors, since they no longer have to manually correct the same repetitive mistakes in a translated text.
Post-editing can be divided into roughly two categories; light and full post-editing. ‘Light’ post-editing, also called ‘gist’, ‘rapid’ or ‘fast’ post-editing focuses on transferring the most correct meaning without spending time correcting grammatical and stylistic errors. Correcting textual standards, like word order and coherence are less important in a light post-edit, compared to a more thorough ‘full’ or ‘conventional’ post-edit. Full post-edits need the correct meaning to be conveyed, correct grammar, accurate punctuation, and the correct transfer of any formatting such as tags or place holders.
The Client often dictates the type of post-editing required, whether it’s a full post-edit to get it up to ‘publishable quality’ similar to a human translation standard, or a light post-edit, which usually means ‘fit for purpose’. The engine’s quality also plays a part in the post-editing effort; using a high volume of in-domain training data during the build produce higher quality engines, which helps to cut post-editing efforts. Other factors such as language combination, domain and text type all contribute to post-editing effort.
Examples of repetitive errors
Some users may experience the following errors in their MT output.
- Capitalization
- Punctuation mistakes, hyphenation, diacritic marks etc.
- Words added/omitted
- Formatting – trailing spaces
SMT engines use a process of pattern matching to identify different regular expressions. Regular expressions or ‘regex’ are special text strings that describe patterns, these patterns need no linguistic analysis so they can be implemented easily across different language pairs. Regular expressions are also important components in developing PEX rules. KantanMT have a list of regular expressions used for both GENTRY Rule files (*.rul) and PEX post-edit files (*.pex).
Post-Editing Automation (PEX)
Repetitive errors can be fixed automatically by uploading PEX rule files. These rule files allow post-editors to spend less time correcting the same repetitive errors by automatically applying PEX constructs to translations generated from a KantanMT engine.
PEX works by incorporating “find and replace” rules. The rules are uploaded as a PEX file and applied while a translation job is being run.
PEX Rule Editor
KantanMT have designed a simple way to create, test and upload post-editing rules to a client profile.
The PEX Rule editor, located in the ‘MykantanMT’ menu, has an easy to use interface. Users can copy a sample of the translated text into the upper text box ‘Test Content’ then input the rules to be applied in the ‘PEX Search Rules’ and their corrections to the ‘PEX Replacement Rules’ box. The user can test the new rules by clicking ‘test rules’ and instantly identify any incorrect rules, before they are uploaded to the profile.
The introduction of tools to assist in the post-editing process helps remove some of the more repetitive corrections for post-editors. The new PEX Editor feature helps improve the PEMT workflow by ensuring all uploaded rule files are correct leading to a more effective method for fixing repetitive errors.