More than tweets: A critical reflection on developing and testing crisis machine translation technology.

The application of machine translation (MT) in crisis settings is of increasing interest to humanitarian practitioners. We collaborated with industry and non-profit partners: (1) to develop and test the utility of an MT system trained specifically on crisis-related content in an under-resourced language combination (French-to-Swahili); and (2) to evaluate the extent to which speakers of both French and Swahili without post-editing experience could be mobilized to post-edit the output of this system effectively. Our small study carried out in Kenya found that our system performed well, provided useful output, and was positively evaluated by inexperienced post-editors. We use the study to discuss the feasibility of MT use in crisis settings for low-resource language combinations and make recommendations on data selection and domain consideration for future crisis-related MT development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]