BiSync: A Bilingual Editor for Synchronized Monolingual Texts
Josep Crego Jitao Xu François Yvon
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 at https://youtu.be/_l-ugDHfNgU .