Ellipsis Translation for a Medical Speech to Speech Translation System

Jonathan Mutal, Johanna Gerlach, Pierrette Bouillon, Hervé Spechbach


Abstract
In diagnostic interviews, elliptical utterances allow doctors to question patients in a more efficient and economical way. However, literal translation of such incomplete utterances is rarely possible without affecting communication. Previous studies have focused on automatic ellipsis detection and resolution, but only few specifically address the problem of automatic translation of ellipsis. In this work, we evaluate four different approaches to translate ellipsis in medical dialogues in the context of the speech to speech translation system BabelDr. We also investigate the impact of training data, using an under-sampling method and data with elliptical utterances in context. Results show that the best model is able to translate 88% of elliptical utterances.
Anthology ID:
2020.eamt-1.30
Volume:
Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation
Month:
November
Year:
2020
Address:
Lisboa, Portugal
Editors:
André Martins, Helena Moniz, Sara Fumega, Bruno Martins, Fernando Batista, Luisa Coheur, Carla Parra, Isabel Trancoso, Marco Turchi, Arianna Bisazza, Joss Moorkens, Ana Guerberof, Mary Nurminen, Lena Marg, Mikel L. Forcada
Venue:
EAMT
SIG:
Publisher:
European Association for Machine Translation
Note:
Pages:
281–290
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.eamt-1.30
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jonathan Mutal, Johanna Gerlach, Pierrette Bouillon, and Hervé Spechbach. 2020. Ellipsis Translation for a Medical Speech to Speech Translation System. In Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation, pages 281–290, Lisboa, Portugal. European Association for Machine Translation.
Cite (Informal):
Ellipsis Translation for a Medical Speech to Speech Translation System (Mutal et al., EAMT 2020)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.eamt-1.30.pdf