This paper presents a study of user-perceived vs real machine translation (MT) post-editing effort and productivity gains, focusing on two bidirectional language pairs: English— German and English—Dutch. Twenty experienced media professionals post-edited statistical MT output and also manually translated comparative texts within a production environment. The paper compares the actual post-editi...

This paper presents a study of user-perceived vs real machine translation (MT) post-editing effort and productivity gains, focusing on two bidirectional language pairs: English— German and English—Dutch. Twenty experienced media professionals post-edited statistical MT output and also manually translated comparative texts within a production environment. The paper compares the actual post-editi...

Today’s “high productivity” programming languages such as Python lack the performance of harder-toprogram “efficiency” languages (CUDA, Cilk, C with OpenMP) that can exploit extensive programmer knowledge of parallel hardware architectures. We combine efficiency-language performance with productivitylanguage programmability using selective embedded just-in-time specialization (SEJITS). At runti...

Peers at work: From the field to the lab by Roel van Veldhuizen, Hessel Oosterbeek and Joep Sonnemans* In an in influential study, Mas and Moretti (2009) found that “worker effort is positively related to the productivity of workers who see him, but not workers who do not see him.” They interpret this as evidence that social pressure can reduce free riding. In this paper we report an attempt to...

Systems developers and researchers have long been interested in the factors that affect software development productivity. Identification of factors as either aiding or hindering productivity enables management to take steps to encourage the positive influences and to eliminate the negative ones. This research has explored the possibility of developing an estimable model of software development...

This paper studies the minimum score at which machine translation (MT) evaluation metrics report productivity gains in a machine translation post-editing (MTPE) task. We ran an experiment involving 10 professional in-house translators from our company in which they were asked to carry out a real translation task involving MTPE, translation from scratch and fuzzymatch editing. We then analyzed t...

We design three field experiments to estimate how workers' social preferences toward their employer motivates work effort. vary the pay rates offered workers, return employer, and generosity demonstrated via unexpected gifts. Workers exert effort even without private incentives, but is insensitive employer. This consistent with “warm glow” not pure altruism. The gifts have no effect on producti...

We provide a characterization of participants’ behavior in a contest or tournament where the marginal productivity of effort varies across contestants and individual productivity is private information. We then consider the optimal design of such a contest. We first analyze contestant behavior for the usual type of contest, where the highest output wins. Abilities need not be independently dist...

at low levels of maturity. The effects of increasing process maturity alone are not easy to determine, because organizations generally make concurrent improvements in other areas that also result in benefits to the development organization. So, a clearer assessment of process maturity effects is needed. Anecdotal case study evidence shows many shortand long-term benefits to improving process ma...