Extending a multilingual chat application: Towards collaborative language resource building

We are developing a multilingual chat application to help children in Japanese schools whose native language is not Japanese communicate with teachers and support staff. Our multilingual chat application utilizes machine translation to allow communication in their native languages. Since special words or expressions are used in school settings, a machine translation service often produces inadequate translations. To cope with such problems, Language Grid provides a machine translation service that utilizes specialized domain specific dictionaries to improve translation quality. However, constructing such dictionaries is not easy. In this paper, we present a system that helps users expand the dictionaries using morphological analysis in the chat application itself. In addition, we present other extensions to the system to further support multilingual communication and build language resources.