Military Communications and Information Technology: A Trusted ...

Chapter 3: Information Technology for Interoperability and Decision...
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We got a BLEU-Score [21] of 8.06 for Google’s output and a BLEU-Score of 9.69
for the ISAF-MT translation. To our knowledge, there is no rule-based translation
system for Dari and German publicly available. For further reports on evaluation
results regarding the ISAF-MT (e.g., BLUE-Scores) system see [4].
Figure 5. Excerpt of Translation Ouput generated by the ISAF-MT SMT System
An approach for applying SMT to intelligence processing
Translations produced by SMT can be of different quality, depending on
the complexity of the input text, on the SMT system, the available training data,
the language pair, etc. In any case, to bring across the meaning, translation does
not have to be perfect. We therefore argue that the output of SMT systems, even
though of varying quality, can support the intelligence process in different ways.
This concept is presented in Figure 2, and will be discussed in the following.
a) First impression / idea of text content for the human analyst: On the basis
of a translation produced by SMT, even if not of perfect quality, the human analyst
can infer the document’s content. Such a broad translation can serve
the human analyst in a first screening of the documents to decide whether
the document is of any relevance and should be passed on for proper (human)
translation or a different further analysis. Apart from that, under the dogma
“any translation is better than no translation” this rough translation can help
the analyst with the different intelligence tasks, where texts in different languages
need to be processed. This would apply if no translator is available, or,
for efficiency reasons.
b) Automatic collection: A rough translation can also serve as input for automatic
information retrieval and for automatic classification. To automatically search
for relevant documents in different languages, it is usually sufficient if the broad
content of the documents is provided. The same applies to automatic classification
of the relevance of documents according to the mission’s needs.