The Computing Research Lab at New Mexico State university is conducting formative user testing of a trans-lingual instant messaging system interface (TrIM) designed to help coalition partners communicate using their own languages. We are concerned with understanding and developing systems that allow coalition partners to communicate in their own languages with the help of machine translation technology and good user interface design. We are paying particular attention to discovering the type of tasks that we can reasonably expect to be accomplished with this technology by typical sets of Army partners. We are also concerned in discovering ways in which to help users correct and repair misunderstandings in their automatically translated communications. The accompanying diagram depicts a typical study we have conducted to address these issues.

In our study, sixteen pairs of participants attempted an information-sharing task developed to stimulate realistic conversation consistent with the design goals of the TrIM system interface (developed by MITRE). These participants were native Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Spanish speakers each paired with an English speaker. The resulting conversations have been analyzed and our observations have been presented to Army groups from the Ft. Huachuca Battle Labs, the LASER ACTD and the MITRE development team responsible for TrIM.

From our observations, we have learned that the context provided by the task can help participants understand rough automatic translations. Data from these sessions also reveled frequent miscommunications about turn taking and meta-comments.

These results have been used to suggest improvements for the design of multi-lingual communication systems to include, for example, high-quality fixed translations to support notification of misunderstandings and turn taking. Also, the results indicate a need to include user controls to turn-off automatic translation for specific terms, especially for proper nouns. Significant collaboration between NMSU and ARL.s Ft Huachuca Field Element was accomplished through many mutual site visits, and through a summer internship by a NMSU graduate student at Ft. Huachuca. The result of this collaboration has been the development of a new map-sharing task for testing multi-lingual collaboration. This task will allow us to study decision-sharing as well as information-sharing in Army relevant situations with expanded numbers of participants, including Army personnel.

This project has been funded as part of the U.S. Army Research Laboratory’s (ARL) Collaborative Technology Alliances program.

Overview Procedures, Results, and Commented Logs

For further information about this project, contact Dr. Bill Ogden