Eye Tracking as a Tool for Machine Translation Error Analysis

Abstract

We present a preliminary study where we use eye tracking as a complement to machine translation (MT) error analysis, the task of identifying and classifying MT errors. We performed a user study where subjects read short texts translated by three MT systems and one human translation, while we gathered eye tracking data. The subjects were also asked comprehension questions about the text, and were asked to estimate the text quality. We found that there are a longer gaze time and a higher number of fixations on MT errors, than on correct parts. There are also differences in the gaze time of different error types, with word order errors having the longest gaze time. We also found correlations between eye tracking data and human estimates of text quality. Overall our study shows that eye tracking can give complementary information to error analysis, such as aiding in ranking error types for seriousness.

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