implementing a multilingual capability to a … summer report august 2015 vol. xxi, no. 1...

DREU Summer Report • August 2015 • Vol. XXI, No. 1

Implementing a Multilingual Capability to a Multimodal Platform:Prime III an Electronic Voting System

Wendy C. Velasquez Ebanks

Undergraduate StudentUniversity of Maryland University College

[email protected]

Juan E. Gilbert

Adviser, Endowed Professor and ChairUniversity of Florida

[email protected]

Elizabeth Mathews

Phd StudentUniversity of [email protected]

Wanda Eugene

Post DocUniversity of Florida

[email protected]

University of Florida Gainesville, FL 32611University of Maryland University College, University of Florida

Abstract

Prime III is a secure accessible, multi-modal electronic voting system that emerged from an initiativeto create an innovative voting system that could be accessible to everyone. Using touch screens, voice,typing, and switch devices, Prime III allows a wide range of citizens to take part in the voting process.This study was conducted with the purpose of improving the current experience of Prime III. Althoughit is a multi-modal platform, it lacked a Multi-Language ability. Adding this feature on the system willoffer future users the ability to vote and understand important statements of the process in their nativelanguage at the moment to practice their right to vote. Without this feature, voters with limited Englishproficiency may disenfranchise, unable to understand complex statements of importance while castingtheir vote. Now, with the test and development of a language object that will be incorporated into thePrime III, will allow more people to vote and feel confident when casting their vote. Therefore, this featureis going to have a great impact on the users of Prime III.

I. Introduction

Prime III implements a multimodal design:"a product and environment to be as usable aspossible by as many people as possible regard-less of age, ability or situation". [1] However,it does not have a multilingual capability. Amultilingual system is the best way to crosslanguage barriers, and to capture the attentionof those that get discourage because they arenot proficient in another language [2].The main focus of this research project wasto analyze, document, design, and implementa strategy that could allow the incorporationof another language besides English into thePrime III system. For the purposes of the

study Spanish was the language selected forthe demonstration. Given that Spanish is themost commonly spoken language in the US,after English, by having 37 million speakers asof September of 2013 and increasing [3], [6].Having an electronic secure voting system thatprovides a multilingual accessibility along withits multimodal access will have a remarkableimpact in a society and working towards thepossibility of increasing the capability to anyother language in the future (See Figure 1).

II. Related Work

Researchers have studied different types ofmethodologies to implement translation inmultimodal platforms facing different types

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of challenges such as the evaluation and anal-ysis of data structures to find out which onewould best fit to the complexity of the systemthey are working on in order to integrate thedifferent software components in addition tothe electronic and mechanical devices that sys-tem interacts with [8], [9]There are diverse aspects to keep in mind,when deciding for one approach or the otherwhen referring to translation methods and mul-timodal interaction has been studied for sev-eral years; (Oviatt, 1999 and Oviatt et al, 2000).Most papers on user studies report experi-ments that were carried out with Wizard-of-Ozsystems and professional users who manipu-lated objects on large terminal screens (Kehleret al., 1998, Martin et al., 1998, and Wahlster etal., 2001) [4].Other techniques of translation on Multimodalplatforms include: Tokenizer dequeue onwhich all tokens are specified off-line in a formof regular expressions. Then a Finite State Ma-chine (FSM) compiler is used for the construc-tion of a tokenizer, which is the most similarto what was implemented for the translator forprime III [7].

III. Methodology

Study of Prime III structure:The Prime III is coded mainly in JavaScript; ituses an HTML, CSS, and PHP programminglanguages. In order to understand its complex-ity, and to find ways to develop a strategy fortranslation there were two main starting points:

• Test Prime III system as user.

• Learn back end of Prime III to designand create concept map that shows therelationship of each file contained on it.

The complexity of its structure presentedseveral challenges, and in order to understandthe inner functionality of the system; some ofits coded functions had to be tested and docu-mented separately. Duplicating the GUI code ofPrime III translated:This method consisted in translating label by

label of the Graphical User Interface to the ac-tual meaning in Spanish. However, that wasa very ineffective method because it will pro-duce a duplication of the entire interface codeof Prime III, which is already long enough (SeeFigure 2).

So, research of tools such as a piece of codeor APIs that could be used to create the seg-ment that will perform the interface transla-tion on Prime III. The study of the structure ofPrime III is coded with the four programminglanguages previously mentioned. the first stepwith coding was to find libraries and functionsthat would work for Prime III. Before testingany of these pieces or APIs the local-host had tobe configured; otherwise, none of them wouldwork properly. The JavaScript programminglanguage does not provide any built in functionfor translation. Instead, it provides a librarythat uses online libraries such as the one called"localized.js" to translate entire websites [5].

Test API code:Part of this study was to test its functions andcertain parts of Prime III separately to verifythe effectiveness of one of the strategies im-plemented such as using the Google API fortranslation, and After trying the inefficiencyon translating the tags by duplicating the codethis was the most effective way. The GoogleAPI took three different phases.

• Phase 1: Display the testing with the ini-tial screen of Prime III and the modifi-cation resulting from using the Snippetcode from Google (See Figure 3.

• Phase 2: Demonstrate the first attempt ofworking with Google voice and transla-tion recognition API and its difference incode (See Figure 4.

• Phase 3: Shows that in order to manipu-late and customize the translation meth-ods of Google API the developer musthave a paid access Key (See Figure 5).

The snippet changed the configuration ofthe interface of Prime III, and also it needs ofthe Internet connection in order for the transla-tor to work.

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The next step on using Google’s API was tofind how to manipulate its functions for trans-lation and customize them in a way that couldwork for Prime III. However, that is not a possi-bility unless you buy the access key that Googleprovides to work with its functions, similarly,happens when using Microsoft Translation APIin to manipulate an Access Key is required forit (See Figure 6).

IV. Results

The translation object was completed and willbe soon implemented into the Prime III sys-tem. Although Prime III system is complex infunctionality, it is not in the vocabulary used tointeract with the user. A preliminary analysisevaluation was made to find other methodsthat could improve the translation methodol-ogy resulted from this research.

The results are shown on Figure 7The best strategy to use for this purpose

was to create a unique library and glossary ofphrases in another language for Prime III. Weutilized Spanish since that is the pilot secondlanguage to be added to the system. The firststep was to develop a strategy on creating anobject that will hold the language equivalencesand will be linked with the access code entered(See Figure 8).

Once the structure was already design andplan, the following step was to create a smallglossary table that contains the English phrasesof Prime III interface and its Spanish transla-tion in detail such as the table on figure 9.

All translations had to verify for correctionwith online dictionaries, and the HTML ASCIIcodification particularly for vowels with tildewhen translated into Spanish. The template de-veloped from the proof of concept will be usedto include additional languages, to extend theaccessibility benefits of Prime III to a broaderrange of voters (See Figure ??).

Testing Functions and parts of Prime III sepa-rately to verify effectiveness of the strategy imple-mented:Functions and small parts of Prime III code

were taken to create a demo that could simulatethe actual functionality of prime III once thetranslation object is integrated in the system.This was mainly done for testing purposes andto find out what the result would be once isimplemented.

Learning and Testing Web Speech Recognition:Mozilla corporation recently release the Webspeech Recognition Feature for its browser [11].In this case the main purpose was to learn,test, and try some of the functions included inthe Web Speech Recognition API from Mozilla.The only two parts of the API tested wereonly WebRTC "Still Photo" with web browsersthrough the Web Speech API, and the commu-nication of one Web browser to another such asFirefox communicating with Google Chromeor Internet Explorer. through the "WebRTCDat-aChannel".

V. Discussion and Design

Recommendations

Future work includes the actual implementa-tion of the translation object into Prime III, nowthat it has been proved and tested. As a result,continuous evaluation will be an essential partof this research which proves to be a success-ful approach to enhance progress and to im-prove the system in various areas that relate tothe translation feature. Being able to split thelanguage script into different files has the ad-vantage that any developer can concentrate itsefforts on a single file, and test its performancewithin a complete system, or using a part withmissing sections to test its functionality.

VI. Conclusion

Overall, this summarizes the challenges en-countered in the development of multilingualfeature for a multimodal platform. The learn-ing experience of studying a multimodal plat-form such as Prime III, and the benefits thatcould bring to a community. Understandinguser needs, the need, the targeted user, andadapting systems that are specialize to the user.

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Definitely, the challenge of developing human-centered applications lies on understanding theneed, the targeted user and develop systemsthat can adapt and specialize to the user [10],which has been a learning lesson throughoutthe research experience.

VII. Aknowledgements

Special thanks to the Computer ResearchAssociation for Women (CRA-W), The Dis-tributed Research Experience for Undergradu-ates (DREU), the Coalition to Diversity Com-puting (CDC), The National Science foundation(NSF), they made possible this experience. Inaddition, I would like to thank my AdviserDr. Gilbert and his team at my host institutionUniversity of Florida because without their con-structive support and assistance I would nothave had such an amazing and productive ex-perience.

References

[1] Prime III: "About Prime III",http://www.primevotingsystem.org/.

[2] Rachel Evans, Joanna E. Cuevas Ingram,"Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights ofthe San Francisco Bay", Voting Rights Bar-riers and Discrimination in Twenty FirstCentury California 2000-2013 P 1-50. 2014.

[3] Mark Hugo Lopez, Ana Gonzalez-Barrera "Pew Research Center" What isthe future of Spanish in the United States?,P. 2013.

[4] Almeida, Luis and Amdal, I and Beires,N and Boualem, M and Boves, L and denOs, E and Filoche, P and Gomes, R andKnudsen, JE and Kvale, K and others,"International CLASS Workshop On Nat-ural, Intelligent and Effective Interactionin Multimodal Dialogue Systems" Imple-menting and evaluating a multimodal andmultilingual tourist guide, P. 2002.

[5] https://github.com/coderifous/jquery-localize

[6] Laura B. Shrestha, Elayne J. Heisler,"Congressional Research Service" TheChanging Demographic Profile of the UnitedStates, P 22-24. 2011.

[7] Matej Rojc, Izidor Mlakar, "InTechSpeech and Language Technologies",Multilingual and Multimodal Corpus-BasedText to Speech system -PLATTOS- , P 129-154. 2011.

[8] Yosr Jarraya, Mourad Debbadi,"Springer", Quantitative and Qualita-tive Analysis of SysML, Activity diagrasm,P 399-419. 2014.

[9] Eytan Adar, Michael Skinner, Daniel S.Weld, Information Arbitrage Across Multi-lingual Wikipedia P 94-103. 2009.

[10] Ahmed Elgammal, "ACM", Human-Centered Multimedia: Representations andChallenges, P 11-17. 2006.

[11] Mozilla, "Mozilla Corporation", WebSpeech Recognition (Web RTC, 2015.

VIII. Appendix

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Figure 1: Prime III Diagram Structure

Figure 2: Manual Translation Inside of Prime III Code

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Figure 3: Selector from Google Snippet Code

Figure 4: Prime III Original Interface

Figure 5: After Using Google Snippet Code

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Figure 6: Access Key Required from Google

Figure 7: API’s comparisons

Figure 8: Object structure Draft

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Figure 9: Glossary of Phrases

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Figure 10: HTML ASCII codes

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