Check out Panos’s extensive live blogging from what, as far as I know, is the first Human Computation Workshop (HCOMP 2009). You can also see the associated #hcomp Twitter activity.
Evidently Luis von Ahn used his keynote to unveil MonoLingo, a human-powered system for translation, but only using people that know one language (no idea if he used the old joke).
According to Panos:
Monolingo relies on the fact that machine translation is pretty good at this point, but not perfect. So MonoLingo starts by by translating each word using a dictionary, giving multiple interpretations for each word. The human then (who is a native speaker of the target language) selects the translation for each word and forms the sentence that makes most sense.
I’m curious to hear more: as of this writing, the site is password-protected with no further information.
