Determining the Tolerance of Text-handling Tasks for MT Output

With the explosion of the internet and access to increased amounts of information provided by international media, the need to process this abundance of information in an efficient and effective manner has become critical. The importance of machine translation (MT) in the stream of information processing has become apparent. With this new demand on the user community comes the need to assess an MT system before adding such a system to the user’s current suite of text-handling applications. The MT Functional Proficiency Scale project has developed a method for ranking the tolerance of a variety of information processing tasks to possibly poor MT output. This ranking allows for the prediction of an MT system’s usefulness for particular text-handling tasks.