Bridging SMT and TM with Translation Recommendation

We propose a translation recommendation framework to integrate Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) output with Translation Memory (TM) systems. The framework recommends SMT outputs to a TM user when it predicts that SMT outputs are more suitable for post-editing than the hits provided by the TM. We describe an implementation of this framework using an SVM binary classifier. We exploit methods to fine-tune the classifier and investigate a variety of features of different types. We rely on automatic MT evaluation metrics to approximate human judgements in our experiments. Experimental results show that our system can achieve 0.85 precision at 0.89 recall, excluding exact matches. Furthermore, it is possible for the end-user to achieve a desired balance between precision and recall by adjusting confidence levels.