Final Report on User Interface Studies, Cognitive and User Modelling

D1.3 marks the final CASMACAT report on user interface studies, cognitive and user modelling covering the completion of tasks T1.5 (Cognitive Modelling) and T1.6 (User Modelling) as part of Work Package 1. Within tasks T1.1 to T1.4, a series of experiments have established a solid understanding of human behaviour in computer-aided translation, focusing on the use of visualization options, different translation modalities, individual differences in translation production, translator types and translation/postediting styles. Additionally, the bulk of this experimental data has been released as a publicly available database under a creative common license and further details on this can be found in D1.4. In parallel to these more holistic studies, a second set of experiments aimed to examine some of these factors in a constrained laboratory setting. These focused on the underlying psycholinguistic processing and cognitive modelling of translators’ activity to capture reading difficulty, verification and perplexity during translation and post-editing. This deliverable combines these earlier empirical findings with experiments conducted in Year 3 of the project and grounds translation within a broader theoretical framework associated with human sentence processing and communication. As well as broadening our general understanding of bilingual cognitive processing, there were two major objectives behind the experimental investigations in Year 3. The first was to evaluate the utility of providing translators with Source-Target word alignment information through spatially-direct visual cues. The second was to determine what, if any, differences arise from expertise by comparing the results between a group of bilinguals and a group of professionally trained translators on the same translation-related tasks.