Machine translation-driven authoring system and method

An authoring system comprising:

• an interface generator for generating an authoring interface on an associated display device for assisting a user to author a text string in a source language for translation to a target string in a target language;
• a suggestion system for receiving source text comprising initial text entered by a user through the authoring interface in the source language and for selecting a set of source phrases from a stored collection of source phrases, each of the set of source phrases including at least one token of the initial source text as a prefix and at least one other token as a suffix, the selection of the set being based on a translatability score which, for each of a stored set of source phrases, is a function of statistics of at least one biphrase of a collection of biphrases, in which biphrase the source phrase occurs in combination with a corresponding target phrase in the target language, the suggestion system proposing a set of candidate phrases for display on the generated interface, the proposed candidate phases each comprising the suffix of a respective one of the source phrases in the set of source phrases;
• the authoring interface being configured for receiving a user's selection of one of the candidate phrases in the set and, where one of the candidate phrases in the set is selected by the user, for appending the selected one of the candidate phrases to the source text;
• the suggestion system being configured generating the text string in the source language from the initial source text and appended text;
• and
• a processor which implements the interface generator and suggestion system.

A method for training an authoring system comprising:

• acquiring a collection of source phrases in a source language from a set of biphrases derived from a parallel corpus of sentences in the source language and a target language;
• with a processor, for each of the source phrases, computing a translatability score as a function of biphrase statistics derived from the parallel corpus for at least one of the biphrases in the set of biphrases for which the source phrase is a source phrase of the biphrase and storing the translatability scores in memory;
• and
• storing a scoring function for scoring each of a set of candidate phrases to be presented to an author for appending to initial source text during authoring of a source string in the source language, each of the candidate phrases, in combination with a portion of the source text, forming one of the source phrases in the collection, the scoring function scoring candidate phrases based on the translatability score, enabling the author to be presented with candidate phrases ranked according to scores output by the scoring function through an authoring interface.