An Analysis (and an Annotated Corpus) of User Responses to Machine Translation Output

We present an annotated resource consisting of open-domain translation requests, automatic translations and user-provided corrections collected from casual users of the translation portal http://reverso.net. The layers of annotation provide: 1) quality assessments for 830 correction suggestions for translations into English, at the segment level, and 2) 814 usefulness assessments for English-Spanish and English-French translation suggestions, a suggestion being useful if it contains at least local clues that can be used to improve translation quality. We also discuss the results of our preliminary experiments concerning 1) the development of an automatic filter to separate useful from non-useful feedback, and 2) the incorporation in the machine translation pipeline of bilingual phrases extracted from the suggestions. The annotated data, available for download from ftp://mi.eng.cam.ac.uk/data/faust/LW-UPC-Oct11-FAUST-feedback-annotation.tgz, is released under a Creative Commons license. To our best knowledge, this is the first resource of this kind that has ever been made publicly available.