ChrEnTranslate: Cherokee-English Machine Translation Demo with Quality Estimation and Corrective Feedback

We introduce ChrEnTranslate, an online machine translation demonstration system for translation between English and an endangered language Cherokee. It supports both statistical and neural translation models as well as provides quality estimation to inform users of reliability, two user feedback interfaces for experts and common users respectively, example inputs to collect human translations for monolingual data, word alignment visualization, and relevant terms from the Cherokee-English dictionary. The quantitative evaluation demonstrates that our backbone translation models achieve state-of-the-art translation performance and our quality estimation well correlates with both BLEU and human judgment. By analyzing 216 pieces of expert feedback, we find that NMT is preferable because it copies less than SMT, and, in general, current models can translate fragments of the source sentence but make major mistakes. When we add these 216 expert-corrected parallel texts into the training set and retrain models, equal or slightly better performance is observed, which demonstrates indicates the potential of human-in-the-loop learning. Our online demo is at https://chren.cs.unc.edu/; our code is open-sourced at https://github.com/ZhangShiyue/ChrEnTranslate; and our data is available at https://github.com/ZhangShiyue/ChrEn.