Translation Alignment with Ugarit

• Published in: Information (Basel) Vol. 13; no. 2; p. 65
• Main Authors: Yousef, Tariq, Palladino, Chiara, Shamsian, Farnoosh, Foradi, Maryam
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Basel MDPI AG 01.02.2022
• Subjects: Alignment; Annotations; Design; Digital humanities; Hand tools; human–computer interaction; Language; Languages; Machine translation; manual alignment; Subject specialists; text visualization; Texts; Training; translation alignment; Translations; translations graph; Usability; user-centered design; Visualization; Ugarit
• ISSN: 2078-2489; 2078-2489
• DOI: 10.3390/info13020065

Ugarit is a public web-based tool for manual annotation of parallel texts for generating word-level translation alignment. We aimed to develop a user-friendly interactive interface to visualize aligned texts and collect training data in the form of translation pairs to be used later, (i) for training an automatic translation alignment system for historical languages at the word/phrase level, (ii) as a gold standard to evaluate automatic alignment and machine translation systems. Ugarit is now widely used for learning new languages, especially historical languages, and as a reading environment for parallel texts. In the following sections, we present the related works and similar projects; then, we give an overview of the visualization techniques used to present the alignment results. Further, we explain how we could derive the translation graph from the aligned translation pairs. Finally, we discuss the usage limitations of Ugarit, possible improvements, and future development plans.