The contribution of a user group to the evaluation and improvement of an MT system

This paper describes the attitude of a Greek public administration user group towards the EC SYSTRAN machine translation (MT) system and its contribution to the system's evaluation and enhancement. EC SYSTRAN was first made available to the Greek public sector in 1994, under an initiative of the Greek Government in collaboration with the EC. Translation services are provided free of charge to the public sector and the system has unproved thanks to the evaluations performed and the terminology provided by the user group. Currently, the group has two sections: the end-users themselves and a team of linguists. The presentation concludes with some statistics on the number of users willing to assist in the enhancement of the MT system together with a description of their profile and an indication of users' reactions (positive/negative comments) to using machine translation services and language technology products.