Vilém Zouhar, Michal Novák, Matúš Žilinec, Ondřej Bojar, Mateo Obregón, Robin L. Hill, Frédéric Blain, Marina Fomicheva, Lucia Specia, Lisa Yankovskaya. Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies. 2021.

CASMACAT is a modular, web-based translation workbench that offers advanced functionalities for computer-aided translation and the scientific study of human translation: automatic interaction with machine translation (MT) engines and translation memories (TM) to obtain raw translations or close TM matchesn for conventional post-editing; interactive translation prediction based on an MT engine’s search graph, detailed recording and replay of edit actions and translator’s gaze (the latter via eye-tracking), and the support of e-pen as an alternative input device. The system is open source sofware and interfaces with multiple MT systems.

Eye-tracking is a valuable tool for usability research. Studies into the effect of age on eye-movement behavior tend to indicate a propensity for slower viewing and longer times spent examining information. This pattern is usually attributed to the general physiological and cognitive slow-down associated with normal aging. In this paper, however, across three different tasks based on computer and internet use (free-viewing, visual search, and browser interaction), we show that among older adults (n=18, age range: 70-93) computer experience appears to be a highly important factor in eye-movement behavior. We argue that as a consequence of the experimental environment used in modern eye-tracking studies, characteristics such as familiarity and experience with computers should be taken into account before conclusions are drawn about the raw effects of age.

Generating referring expressions is a task that has received a great deal of attention in the natural-language generation community, with an increasing amount of recent effort targeted at the generation of multimodal referring expressions. However, most implemented systems tend to assume very little shared knowledge between the speaker and the hearer, and therefore must generate fully-elaborated linguistic references. Some systems do include a representation of the physical context or the dialogue context; however, other sources of contextual information are not normally used. Also, the generated references normally consist only of language and, possibly, deictic pointing gestures.

A proof of concept web search and navigation system was developed for older people for whom the Internet is seen as an alien territory. A joint industry/academia team deployed User Sensitive Inclusive Design principles, focusing on the usability of the interface for this user group. The search and navigation system that was developed was significantly preferred by the user group to that provided by a standard commercial (Internet Service Provider) system; it scored highly for ease of use and the participants reported increased confidence in their ability to master the Internet. Recorded quantitative measures showed fewer task errors. The outcome of the development was a successful "proof of concept" search and navigation system for older novice computer users together with approaches to design and development for those who wish to design for this user group.

Contemporary technology offers many benefits to older people, but these are often rendered inaccessible through poor software design. As the Internet increasingly becomes a source of information and services it is vital to ensure that older people can access these resources. As part of project funded by the UK government, a multi-disciplinary team set out to develop usable software that would help to introduce older people to the Internet. The first step was to develop an email system for older people with no experience of Internet use. The project was intended to show that it is possible to design usable technology for this group and to explore some of the issues involved in doing so. Design and technical challenges necessitated various tradeoffs. The system produced demonstrated the success of the design decisions: it was significantly easier to use than, and preferred to, a commercial equivalent by a group of older people with no experience of Internet use. © 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.