BACKGROUND In the context of the current refugee crisis, emergency services often have to deal with patients who have no language in common with the staff. As interpreters are not always available, especially in emergency settings, medical personnel rely on alternative solutions such as machine translation, which raises reliability and data confidentiality issues, or medical fixed-phrase translators, which sometimes lack usability. A collaboration between Geneva University Hospitals and Geneva University led to the development of BabelDr, a new type of speech-enabled fixed-phrase translator. Similar to other fixed-phrase translators (such as Medibabble or UniversalDoctor), it relies on a predefined list of pretranslated sentences, but instead of searching for sentences in this list, doctors can freely ask questions. OBJECTIVE This study aimed to assess if a translation tool, such as BabelDr, can be used by doctors to perform diagnostic interviews under emergency conditions and to reach a correct diagnosis. In addition, we aimed to observe how doctors interact with the system using text and speech and to investigate if speech is a useful modality in this context. METHODS We conducted a crossover study in December 2017 at Geneva University Hospitals with 12 French-speaking doctors (6 doctors working at the outpatient emergency service and 6 general practitioners who also regularly work in this service). They were asked to use the BabelDr tool to diagnose two standardized Arabic-speaking patients (one male and one female). The patients received a priori list of symptoms for the condition they presented with and were instructed to provide a negative or noncommittal answer for all other symptoms during the diagnostic interview. The male patient was standardized for nephritic colic and the female, for cystitis. Doctors used BabelDr as the only means of communication with the patient and were asked to make their diagnosis at the end of the dialogue. The doctors also completed a satisfaction questionnaire. RESULTS All doctors were able to reach the correct diagnosis based on the information collected using BabelDr. They all agreed that the system helped them reach a conclusion, even if one-half felt constrained by the tool and some considered that they could not ask enough questions to reach a diagnosis. Overall, participants used more speech than text, thus confirming that speech is an important functionality in this type of tool. There was a negative association (P=.02) between the percentage of successful speech interactions (spoken sentences sent for translation) and the number of translated text items, showing that the doctors used more text when they had no success with speech. CONCLUSIONS In emergency settings, when no interpreter is available, speech-enabled fixed-phrase translators can be a good alternative to reliably collect information from the patient.
Over the last fifteen years, following Perlmutter and Postal’s (1983) work, there has been constant interest in the problem raised by transitivity alternations. Perlmutter and Postal argued that the single argument of intransitive verbs may either be generated as an object of the verb (unaccusative verbs) or as a subject (unergative verbs) (cf. Bassac 1997). A sub-class of unaccusative verbs show both transitive and intransitive use, as in (1) and (2):
The common thread that connects the first three papers is that, contrary to a wideheld view, metonymy and metaphor can be studied systematically. The contributors present and analyze various data sets that are taken to fall outside of the traditional areas of knowledge investigated in contemporary linguistic research. Our goal is to show that a subset of phenomena that have been labeled lexical idiosyncrasies (sense shift phenomena) and world/pragmatic knowledge effects (metonymy and metaphor) actually constitute a privileged window on the nature of lexical knowledge.
Dans tout dialogue, les phrases elliptiques sont tres nombreuses. Dans cet article, nous evaluons leur impact sur la reconnaissance et la traduction dans le systeme de traduction automatique de la paroleMedSLT. La resolution des ellipses y est effectuee par une methode robuste et portable, empruntee aux systemes de dialogue homme-machine. Cette derniere exploite une representation semantique plate et combine des techniques linguistiques (pour construire la representation) et basees sur les exemples (pour apprendre sur la base d'un corpus ce qu'est une ellipse bien formee dans un sous-domaine donne et comment la resoudre). Elliptical phrases are frequent in all genres of dialogue. In this paper, we describe an evaluation of the speech understanding component of the MedSLT medical speech translation system, which focusses on the contrast between system performance on elliptical phrases and full utterances. Ellipsis resolution in the system is handled by a robust and portable method, adapted from similar methods commonly used in spoken dialogue systems, which exploits the flat representation structures used. The resolution module combines linguistic methods, used to construct the representations, with an example-based approach to defining the space of well-formed ellipsis resolutions in a subdomain.
We describe a bidirectional version of the grammar-based MedSLT medical speech system. The system supports simple medical examination dialogues about throat pain between an English-speaking physician and a Spanish-speaking patient. The physician's side of the dialogue is assumed to consist mostly of WH-questions, and the patient's of elliptical answers. The paper focusses on the grammar-based speech processing architecture, the ellipsis resolution mechanism, and the online help system.
To enhance sharing of knowledge across the language barrier, the ACCEPT project focuses on improving machine translation of user-generated content by investigating pre- and post-editing strategies. Within this context, we have developed automatic monolingual post-editing rules for French, aimed at correcting frequent errors automatically. The rules were developed using the AcrolinxIQ technology, which relies on shallow linguistic analysis. In this paper, we present an evaluation of these rules, considering their impact on the readability of MT output and their usefulness for subsequent manual post-editing. Results show that the readability of a high proportion of the data is indeed improved when automatic post-editing rules are applied. Their usefulness is confirmed by the fact that a large share of the edits brought about by the rules are in fact kept by human post-editors. Moreover, results reveal that edits which improve readability are not necessarily the same as those preserved by post-editors in the final output, hence the importance of considering both readability and post-editing effort in the evaluation of post-editing strategies.
In this paper, we present evidence that providing users of a speech to speech translation system for emergency diagnosis (MedSLT) with a tool that helps them to learn the coverage greatly improves their success in using the system. In MedSLT, the system uses a grammar-based recogniser that provides more predictable results to the translation component. The help module aims at addressing the lack of robustness inherent in this type of approach. It takes as input the result of a robust statistical recogniser that performs better for out-of-coverage data and produces a list of in-coverage example sentences. These examples are selected from a defined list using a heuristic that prioritises sentences maximising the number of N-grams shared with those extracted from the recognition result.
As numbers of graduates with impairments are actually decreasing, higher education access and study conditions are in need of improvement for students with sensory impairments in Switzerland. A survey was carried out in order to determine the status quo in higher education for Swiss deaf, blind, visually and hearing-impaired individuals. The current paper presents the survey, discusses methodological and technical issues and points out preliminary results concerning Swiss-German deaf and hearing-impaired individuals.
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