BiSync: A Bilingual Editor for Synchronized Monolingual Texts

Josep Crego, Jitao Xu, François Yvon


Abstract
In our globalized world, a growing number of situations arise where people are required to communicate in one or several foreign languages. In the case of written communication, users with a good command of a foreign language may find assistance from computer-aided translation (CAT) technologies. These technologies often allow users to access external resources, such as dictionaries, terminologies or bilingual concordancers, thereby interrupting and considerably hindering the writing process. In addition, CAT systems assume that the source sentence is fixed and also restrict the possible changes on the target side. In order to make the writing process smoother, we present BiSync, a bilingual writing assistant that allows users to freely compose text in two languages, while maintaining the two monolingual texts synchronized. We also include additional functionalities, such as the display of alternative prefix translations and paraphrases, which are intended to facilitate the authoring of texts. We detail the model architecture used for synchronization and evaluate the resulting tool, showing that high accuracy can be attained with limited computational resources. The interface and models are publicly available at https://github.com/jmcrego/BiSync and a demonstration video can be watched on YouTube https://youtu.be/_l-ugDHfNgU.
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-demo.35
Volume:
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 3: System Demonstrations)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Danushka Bollegala, Ruihong Huang, Alan Ritter
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
369–376
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-demo.35
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-demo.35
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Josep Crego, Jitao Xu, and François Yvon. 2023. BiSync: A Bilingual Editor for Synchronized Monolingual Texts. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 3: System Demonstrations), pages 369–376, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
BiSync: A Bilingual Editor for Synchronized Monolingual Texts (Crego et al., ACL 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-demo.35.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-demo.35.mp4