TR-IT-0013 :1993.8.30

Christian Boitet

Human-Oriented Design and Human-Machine-Human Interactions in Machine Interpretation

Abstract:This report first tries to demonstrate that future Dialogue Interpreting Telecommunications systems will necessarily integrate a human interpreter acting as supervisor and "warm body", rely on interactive disambiguation by the interlocutors, and be equipped with multimodal facilities. It then examines possible hardware configurations, and sketches a rough scenario for such a Human-Assisted Machine Interpretation system. Finally, direct and indirect "human-machine-human" (H-M-H) interactions are analyzed, in particular those occurring during interactive disambiguation. Related software engineering and lingware engineering research problems are briefly discussed, in particular that of managing parallel multimodal interactions.

This report is a synthesis and extension of two communications:

[1] Boitet, Ch. Practical Speech Translation Systems will integrate human expertise, multimodal communication, and interactive disambiguation. Proc. MTS-IV, Kobe, 18-22 July 1993, 173-176.

[2] Boitet, Ch. & Loken-Kim, K. H. Human-Machine-Human Interactions in Interpreting Telecommunications. Proc. International Symposium on Spoken Dialogue, Waseda niversity, Tokyo, 10-12 November 1993, to appear.

The research reported here was conducted while I was staying at ATR Interpreting Telephony Research Laboratories, and then at ATR Interpreting Telecommunications Research Laboratories, as visiting researcher from GETA, IMAG, UJF&CNRS, France. I would like to heartly thank ATR for its constant support and very favorable research environment; and its members, from President through supervisors through researchers through secretaries to security personal, for all the personal help which they extended to me in so many ways at so many occasions.