MTUOC : easy and free integration of NMT systems in professional translation environments (2020)

Abstract: In this paper the MTUOC project, aiming to provide an easy integration of neural and statistical machine translation systems, is presented. Almost all the required software to train and use neural and statistical MT systems are released under free licences. However, their use is not always easy and intuitive and medium-high specialized skills are required. MTUOC project provides simplified scripts for preprocessing and training MT systems, and a server and client for easy use of the trained systems. The server is compatible with popular CAT tools for a seamless integration. The project also distributes some free engines.

## introduction mtuoc is a project from the arts and humanities department at the universitat oberta de catalunya (uoc) to facilitate the use and integration of neural and statistical machine translation systems. most of the software needed for training and using such systems is distributed under free permissive licences. so this technology is, in principle, freely available for any professional, company or organization. the use of mt toolkits presents some problems: mtuoc tries to offer solutions for the first two problems. regarding the technological skills problem, it provides a series of easy-to-use and easyto-understand python and bash scripts for corpus pre-processing and training. all these scripts are well documented and can be adapted and extended in an easy way. regarding the integration problem, a fully configurable server and client are provided. the server can mimic the behaviour of several kinds of servers, so it can be used with a large range of cat tools. for example, the server can use a marian engine but behave as a moses server so it can be directly integrated with omegat. the client can deal with several widely used file formats (as xliff, for example) and generate tmx translation memories that can be used in any cat tool. regarding the hardware problem, several facts should be borne in mind. firstly, hardware requirements for training are much harder than for translating. once an engine is trained, it can be used in any consumer computer. so many potential users can benefit from the freely available engines. several providers can offer the service of training tailored machine translation systems. uoc can sign technology-transfer agreements with companies and organizations to train tailored systems at very competitive rates. this service is free for ngos. secondly, the price of hardware is getting lower over time and powerful gpu units are now available at affordable prices. ## components the mtuoc project offers six main components: for several smt and nmt toolkits -evaluation scripts: providing some widely used mt evaluation metrics (as bleu, nist, wer, ter, edit distance) ## mt toolkits mtuoc-server can be used with the following mt toolkits. all the components of mtuoc can be downloaded from its sourceforge page. 5 the documentation of the systems is available in the wiki space of the project page. all the mtuoc components are released under a free licence, namely gnu gpl version 3.