A communicative approach to exploring Machine Interpreting in conference settings
In recent years, machine interpreting has gained momentum thanks to the swift advances in artificial intelligence. Due to dramatic improvements in the quality of interlingual translation and automatic transcription thanks to the deployment of neural networks, commercial applications have been developed for use in non-professional and semi-professional environments. National and international institutions are currently also looking at the implementation of such technologies to support multilingual communication.
Empirical investigations on machine interpreting have so far mostly been conducted within the framework of computer science, for instance with the goal of improving the current widely used cascading approach to speech-to-speech translation, or of exploring the potential of replacing it with end-to-end systems. So far, investigations have been technology-centred and have focused on the linguistic evaluation of the output. What is missing is a communicative approach to the analysis and evaluation of machine interpreting that considers, among others:
- Evaluating machine interpreting in real interactions between humans
- Understanding the societal impacts of machine interpreting
- Analyzing how MI and in general AI may influence the work environment of professional interpreters
Funding: The project is financed by the Inneruniversitäre Forschungsförderung 2020-2021
Find out more at: www.cai.uni-mainz.de