Evaluation of Domain Adaptation Techniques for TRANSLI in a Real-World Environment

Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) systems specialized for one domain often perform poorly when applied to other domains. Domain adaptation techniques allow SMT models trained from a source domain with abundant data to accommodate different target domains with limited data. This paper evaluates the performance of two adaptive techniques based on log-linear and mixture models on data from the legal domain in real-world settings. Performance evaluation includes postediting time and effort required by a professional post-editor to improve the quality of machine-generated translations to meet industry standards, as well as traditional automated scoring techniques (BLEU scores). Results indicates that the domain adaptation techniques can yield a significant increase in BLEU score (up to three points) and a significant reduction in post-editing time of about one second per word in an operational environment.