Claudio Fantinuoli

Claudio Fantinuoli

Machine Interpreting systems are currently implemented as unimodal, real-time speech-to-speech architectures, processing translation exclusively on the basis of the linguistic signal. Such reliance on a single modality, however, constrains performance in contexts where disambiguation and adequacy depend on additional cues, such as visual, situational, or pragmatic information. This paper introduces Vision-Grounded Interpreting (VGI), a novel approach designed to address the limitations of unimodal machine interpreting. We present a prototype system that integrates a vision-language model to process both speech and visual input from a webcam, with the aim of priming the translation process through contextual visual information. To evaluate the effectiveness of this approach, we constructed a hand-crafted diagnostic corpus targeting three types of ambiguity. In our evaluation, visual grounding substantially improves lexical disambiguation, yields modest and less stable gains for gender resolution, and shows no benefit for syntactic ambiguities. We argue that embracing multimodality represents a necessary step forward for advancing translation quality in machine interpreting.

Xiaoman Wang, Claudio Fantinuoli

Assessing the performance of interpreting services is a complex task, given the nuanced nature of spoken language translation, the strategies that interpreters apply, and the diverse expectations of users. The complexity of this task become even more pronounced when automated evaluation methods are applied. This is particularly true because interpreted texts exhibit less linearity between the source and target languages due to the strategies employed by the interpreter. This study aims to assess the reliability of automatic metrics in evaluating simultaneous interpretations by analyzing their correlation with human evaluations. We focus on a particular feature of interpretation quality, namely translation accuracy or faithfulness. As a benchmark we use human assessments performed by language experts, and evaluate how well sentence embeddings and Large Language Models correlate with them. We quantify semantic similarity between the source and translated texts without relying on a reference translation. The results suggest GPT models, particularly GPT-3.5 with direct prompting, demonstrate the strongest correlation with human judgment in terms of semantic similarity between source and target texts, even when evaluating short textual segments. Additionally, the study reveals that the size of the context window has a notable impact on this correlation.

Claudio Fantinuoli, Maddalena Montecchio

Recent years have seen an increasing number of studies around the design of computer-assisted interpreting tools with integrated automatic speech processing and their use by trainees and professional interpreters. This paper discusses the role of system latency of such tools and presents the results of an experiment designed to investigate the maximum system latency that is cognitively acceptable for interpreters working in the simultaneous modality. The results show that interpreters can cope with a system latency of 3 seconds without any major impact in the rendition of the original text, both in terms of accuracy and fluency. This value is above the typical latency of available AI-based CAI tools and paves the way to experiment with larger context-based language models and higher latencies.

Claudio Fantinuoli, Giulia Marchesini, David Landan et al.

High-quality human interpretation requires linguistic and factual preparation as well as the ability to retrieve information in real-time. This situation becomes particularly relevant in the context of remote simultaneous interpreting (RSI) where time-to-event may be short, posing new challenges to professional interpreters and their commitment to delivering high-quality services. In order to mitigate these challenges, we present Interpreter Assist, a computer-assisted interpreting tool specifically designed for the integration in RSI scenarios. Interpreter Assist comprises two main feature sets: an automatic glossary creation tool and a real-time suggestion system. In this paper, we describe the overall design of our tool, its integration into the typical RSI workflow, and the results achieved on benchmark tests both in terms of quality and relevance of glossary creation as well as in precision and recall of the real-time suggestion feature.

Claudio Fantinuoli, Bianca Prandi

In recent years, automatic speech-to-speech and speech-to-text translation has gained momentum thanks to advances in artificial intelligence, especially in the domains of speech recognition and machine translation. The quality of such applications is commonly tested with automatic metrics, such as BLEU, primarily with the goal of assessing improvements of releases or in the context of evaluation campaigns. However, little is known about how the output of such systems is perceived by end users or how they compare to human performances in similar communicative tasks. In this paper, we present the results of an experiment aimed at evaluating the quality of a real-time speech translation engine by comparing it to the performance of professional simultaneous interpreters. To do so, we adopt a framework developed for the assessment of human interpreters and use it to perform a manual evaluation on both human and machine performances. In our sample, we found better performance for the human interpreters in terms of intelligibility, while the machine performs slightly better in terms of informativeness. The limitations of the study and the possible enhancements of the chosen framework are discussed. Despite its intrinsic limitations, the use of this framework represents a first step towards a user-centric and communication-oriented methodology for evaluating real-time automatic speech translation.