Machine translation benchmarks have never looked better, but how well do current tools help people communicate across language barriers? In this talk, I will share some insights from human-centered work on how lay users perceive and rely on machine translation, and what those findings imply for evaluation and system design. I will then turn to open questions on what it would take to put communication success at the center of LLM research & development.
Marine Carpuat is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Maryland. Her research focuses on developing AI techniques that help people communicate across languages, and studying whether those systems actually succeed. Her work spans NLP methods, evaluation methodology, and human-centered studies of how people perceive and rely on AI-generated translations. Before joining UMD, she was a Research Officer at the National Research Council Canada. She received her PhD from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and a diplôme d'ingénieur from the French grande école Supélec.