Using cultural knowledge to assist communication

between people with different cultural background

Bruno A. Sugiyama1, Junia C. Anacleto1, Sidney Fels2 and Helena M. Caseli1
1
Department of Computer Science, Federal University of São Carlos, São Carlos – SP, Brazil
2
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of British Columbia, Vancouver – BC, Canada
+55 (16) 3351-8615
{bruno_sugiyama, junia}@dc.ufscar.br, ssfels@ece.ubc.ca, helenacaseli@dc.ufscar.br

Keywords
ABSTRACT Cultural Translation. Communication mediated by technology,
We present a computational application to facilitate text chat- Human Computer Interaction, Natural Language Process
based communication between people with different cultural and
language background. We focus on end-to-end communication
between people with rudimentary and intermediary knowledge of 1. INTRODUCTION
the second language using computer support rather than using a Currently, text messaging is a common form of communication
simple connection with automated computer translation. Through between people either on their computer or cell phone due to the
a user-centered design process, involving three increasingly hi- growth of the internet [13] and the ubiquitous nature of
fidelity prototypes, we created a system that allows users who communication technologies. Due to globalization [9], these text
speak different languages to send text messages between them that messages are frequently exchanged between people who speak
begins with an automated translation of their message that does a different languages and have different cultural backgrounds. Since
partial translation but normally has words that are not translated the exchange of messages is via text, it suggests that automatic
well. These poorly translated words are then searched for in a language translation systems may be helpful. However,
common sense knowledge base for the sender's culture that communication between users that speak different languages can
contains meanings gleaned from a large open source initiative to be affected due to linguistic and cultural differences of each
collect common sense knowledge. Using these additional concepts participant making automated translation difficult. By culture we
and words coupled to a translator, the user can select from a list of understand it is “that complex whole which includes knowledge,
translations those that are better suited to the intention of the belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and
message. We illustrate the usefulness of our approach empirically habits acquired by man as a member of society” [17].
to show that users find the augmented translated messages are In order to deal with the users’ culture, this work presents a chat
culturally sensitive and provide better communication experiences application to assist users in the process of creating messages in
than without it. Our study used messaging between Portuguese another language intended as an augmentation of an automatic
(Brazilian) and English speakers. text translator tool. Typically, cultural idioms, slang and phrases
etc. cause trouble for automatic translation, which is where our
Categories and Subject Descriptors system provides suggestions based on the user’s cultural
D.2.2 [Software Engineering]: Design Tools and Techniques - background. We find these suggestions by adapting a common
evolutionary prototyping, user interfaces; H.1.2 [Information sense knowledge database [1] (DB) from each users’ background,
Systems]: User/Machine Systems - human factors, human (i.e., Brazilian DB for Brazilian text and a US DB for American
information processing; H.5.2 [Information Interfaces and text), to create a culturally contextualized application. From a
Presentation]: User Interfaces - graphical user interface, natural user’s perspective, culturally based words not found in the
language, prototyping, screen design, user-centered design; automated translator tool appear in a text box that has alternative
suggestions from our system that makes suggestions to allow them
to select the meaning they intend rather than the usually more
General Terms literal meaning that comes from the automatic translator. In this
Design, Human Factors, Experimentation, Languages. fashion, the communication between two culturally separate
groups can be improved.
This paper is organized as follows: section 2 presents works that
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183
2. RELATED WORK
2.1 Commonsense Knowledge
This work is related to a range of projects ([1], [2], [10], for
example) that are involved in the applicability of a kind of cultural
knowledge: common sense. Common sense can be defined as the
knowledge of every-day things based in life experience or beliefs
of a group considering the time, space and social aspects
Examples of common sense knowledge are “a lemon is sour”,
“when you receive a gift you may be happy” or “a pineapple is a
kind of fruit”.
In order to use this kind of knowledge in computational
application, making them more familiar to the user’s context, this
work adopted the commonsense knowledge database of two
projects: Open Mind Common Sense (OMCS) and Open Mind
Common Sense in Brazil (OMCS-Br). While OMCS exists since
1999, the OMCS-Br Project was created in 2005. Both of them
collect common sense knowledge through their websites.
In Figure 1 is shown the architecture of the OMCS-Br Project.
Because the two projects have similar ways to collect and use this
kind of knowledge, we will describe only the Brazilian Project.
In the Brazilian website (Figure 1 - I), this knowledge is collected
by a fill-in-the-gap mechanism: semi-structured sentences
(templates) with gaps to be completed by people. For example:
A breezy is also known as _____.
A milkshake is made of ________.
Soccer is a kind of ______.
II
III
I is not restricted to a specific MT. The aim of the project is to
IV
Figure 1 Architecture of OMCS-Br
The templates (written in English in this paper just for
clarification) are made of three parts: a dynamic part, a static part
and a blank part (the horizontal line). The dynamic part,
represented by the bold words, is filled automatically by the
computer; the static part is a fixed query structure; the blank part
is where the user writes what she/he thinks.
The complete sentence is stored in a database (Figure 1 - II) and,
then, is processed by some NLP mechanisms (a lemmatizer, a PoS
tagger, etc.) that break it in interconnected concepts (Figure 1 -
III). The link between two concepts is tagged by a Minky’s
relation. Misnky [11] defined that the human knowledge can be
184
mapped through 20 relations such as defined-as, is-a, part-of,
made-of, property-of and others. These relations give more
semantic in the link between two concepts. The set of concepts
and relation forms a semantic network of concepts called
ConceptNet (Figure 1 - IV). Some examples of facts from
ConceptNet are presented below:
defined-as(breezy, girlfriend)
made-of(milkshake, ice cream)
is-a(soccer, sport)
The computer applications work with the ConceptNet through an
API that provides some function to manipulate its data.
The OMCS-Br Project has more than 280,000 sentences stored in
its database and just over 1,800 contributors. While the OMCS
English site, currently, has over a million sentences from over
15,000 contributors.
2.2 Machine Translation
Other related projects are those who work with machine
translation of texts. Machine Translation (MT) is one of the most
important subfields of NLP, and the phrase-based Statistical
Machine Translation (SMT) approach is considered the state-of-
the-art according to the automatic measures BLEU [15] and NIST
[3]. The translation and language models used in SMT are built
from a training parallel corpora (a set of source sentences and
their translations into the target language) by means of IBM
models [7] which calculate the probability of a given source word
(or sequence of words) be translated to a target word (or sequence
of words).
In our experiment to test our hypothesis in this article, we decide
to use Google Translate 1 because it performed well in some
preliminary runs, but any other machine translation could be
chosen. We also performed experiments with the open-source
SMT Moses Toolkit 2 [5]. The corpus available for our research
[4] contained articles from the online version of the Brazilian
scientific magazine Pesquisa FAPESP 3 written in Brazilian
Portuguese (original) and English (version). It contains
approximately 500.000 words in each language, which is
considerably less than the training set used by Google.
Our proposal is to create a chat tool that is “MT-independent”, i.e.,
excel the power of Common Sense. Thus, in order to achieve this
goal, we have to choose a MT that provides a good translation in
the chat topics. Our work will deal with Portuguese (Brazil) to
English translations and vice-versa.
3. WORK DESCRIPTION
3.1 Methodology
The development of our chat application has been following the
User-Centered Designer (UCD) approach described in [2]. We
adopted that approach because we are interested in the
1
http://translate.google.com.br/
2
http://www.statmt.org/moses/
3
http://revistapesquisa.fapesp.br
communication between different users. Thus, we need to
understand the user’s behavior to develop a successful tool.
The life cycle of the project consists of iterative and interrelated
stages. For each stage, we need to define (1) the goal of the stage,
(2) the questions raised in that step, (3) the resources that helped
to answer the questions, (4) the answers for the questions and (5)
the stakeholders who participated in this iteration. An example of
a stage is described as follow: (1) modeling the user mental
model; (2) How is the interaction among users? Which mental
model to choose: sender mental model or receiver mental model?;
(3) block diagrams and paper prototyping that shows a interaction
between two users; (4) The sender will work on the creation of a
message with the help of a machine translation and a cultural
knowledge base; the system will be designed guided by the
sender’s mental model; (5) the stakeholders of that stage are the
supervisor of the project, the co-supervisor and a foreign
professor.
Following this approach, the initial stages of the project consists
of studies about concepts from HCI and NLP areas. HCI will
provide mechanisms to guide the project development focusing on
end-user needs. NLP will provide methods and techniques to
translated texts and data, i. e. convert a text in source language to
target language using MT. From these fields, this project adopts
two resources: common sense knowledge to deal with
participants’ cultural specificities of the chat and statistical
machine translation to provide a good translation.
3.2 Using the cultural knowledge
For this work we are interested in two of the twenty Minsky’s
relations: defined-as and is-a. The relation “defined-as” connects
concepts that have the same meaning, i.e., synonym words. The
relation “is-a” represents a hierarchy between the concepts [10].
For instance, is-a(soccer, sport) represents that the concept
“sport” is more abstract or generic than the concept “soccer”.
Using the ConceptNet, an application can provide, for instance, a
synonym list for slang words with a simple algorithm described
below.
Given a sentence, the application divides it in phrases. For each
phrase, a search through the ConceptNet is performed in order to
identify if the phrase is connected with the concept “slang” by the
relation “is-a”. This means that the word or expression can be
slang in the sentence. For each term found in the earlier step,
another search through the ConceptNet is performed in order to
find other related terms linked by the relation “defined-as”. These
related words are synonyms of the slang found in the given
sentence.
For example, given the sentence “My breezy is very kind to my
mom”, the application can identify through the ConceptNet that
the word “breezy” can be slang, i.e., the fact “is-a(breezy, slang)”
exists in the semantic network. The next step is to find the
synonym words, selecting concepts that are linked by the relation
defined-as, for instance, “defined-as(breezy, girlfriend)”. We need
to collect all X in “defined-as(X, Y)” and “defined-as(Y, X)”
where Y=“breezy”, thus we have our list of synonyms of the word
“breezy”.
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3.3 Prototyping
Because the chat application of this project is not only a tool to
connect users but one to assist the translation process, we need to
understand how would be the interaction process between the user
and the two resources described above. With the purpose of
achieving this goal we have been built some prototypes, passing
through three fidelity-level of prototyping: low, medium and high.
In order to build applications that have higher chances to be
successful from the end-user’s point of view we need to be aware
of the end-user’s mental model [6]. Paper prototyping [16]
permits designers to draw an interface closer to what users expect.
It does not require any technology techniques and it is very fast to
design. This kind of low-fidelity prototype is recommended in
early project stages due the low cost and flexibility in design
changes.
We used paper prototyping in two stages of the project. The two
paper prototyping are shown in Figure 2. In the early prototype
(Figure 2 – item I) the user that wants to send a messenger
(sender) writes a text in her/his native language. She/he sends it to
the receiver. The message is translated by a SMT and is displayed
to the receiver. The system identifies and highlights the words or
expression that could not be translated by the SMT system. The
receiver then clicks on the highlights words and concepts related
to that word are displayed to her/him so that she/he can
comprehend the message. This prototype maps the mental model
of the receiver.
I
II
Figure 2 Paper prototype
This paper prototype was presented to the stakeholders. A NLP
expert was surprise with this kind of prototype. One problem with
that model occurs when the message contains a lot of words that
could not be translated. The receiver might get lost with so many
terms in that message. Two HCI experts suggest that the system
need a resource where the user can participate in the translation
process.
In another stage, we created the prototype shown in Figure 2 –
item II. The application was named 2-Chat and a new mental
model was mapped: the sender’s mental model. This version puts
the user and machine together in order to create a message in the
target language. The interaction model of this prototyped is closer
to the one presented in our high-fidelity prototype that will be
described in the next section.
In order to validate our proposal we evolved our prototype to a
medium-fidelity one [12] (also called mid-fidelity prototype [8])
to be presented to a committee of teachers. This prototype is
shown in Figure 3. This kind of prototype increased the look-and-
feel of the application and still kept some characteristics of the
low-fidelity prototype: it was fast to build and easy to make
changes. The prototyping was build with the help of Balsamiq
Mockup 4 and Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007 5. The name of
the application was changed to Culture-to-Chat (C2C).
Figure 3 Medium-fidelity prototype of the chat
After the teachers’ approval, in the next stage of the project, we
needed to investigate the applicability of the common sense and
SMT tools. It is very difficult to connect preexistent
computational resources with the medium-fidelity prototype.
Therefore, we built a high-level prototype in Java (J2SE) that
interacts with the ConceptNet API and the SMT Moses Toolkit.
For the time being, this prototype does not promote the
communication of different users but can be used to test some
functional features. This prototype can be used to perform some
proof-tests in order to analyze the content of the two resources. In
the next section, we will describe the interface and the interaction
process between the application and users.
3.4 Culture-to-Chat
The interface of the high-fidelity prototype of C2C is shown in
Figure 4. In this figure, item I represents the area where all the
history of the conversation will be displayed. Item II is where the
original message will be written in the source language and, once
finished, the button “Translate” (item III) have to be pushed and
4
http://www.balsamiq.com/builds/mockups-web-demo/
5
http://office.microsoft.com/pt-br/downloads/CD010200683.aspx
186
the message be processed by the two tools previously described.
The cultural knowledge output will be displayed is item IV
(Cultural Translator) and the translated message will be show in
item V (Machine Translator). Item VI identifies the button “Send”
that will send the translated message to its destination. In order to
illustrate this process, we describe below an example of the
process of creating a message in the communication between a
Brazilian and an American.
When the interaction starts, the American user sees the interface
in Figure 4. Then, he receives a message from the Brazilian asking
something about an actress of a movie (displayed in Figure 5 – I).
Immediately after this, he writes (in Figure 5 - II): “That girl is not
a minger, but she has a stranger appearance” and pushes the
“Translate” button (in Figure 5 – III). In that moment, the
message is sent to the Machine Translator (to translate from
English to Portuguese) and also to the Cultural Translator (to look
for common sense knowledge related to the words without
translation). Supposing that the Machine Translator would not be
able to provide the translation for the English word “minger”, the
generated Portuguese sentence cannot provide a fully
understanding (shown in Figure 5 – V). The Cultural Translator
can help the American user to provide some information about the
term “minger”, using the algorithm described in section 2.1. For
example, in Figure 5 - IV, the Cultural Translator would show
that ”minger” is defined as “a ugly person” or “something not
attractive“ (followed by their translations to Portuguese: definido
como pessoa feia, definido como sem atrativos). Thus, the
American can edit the translated message (in Figure 5 - V), for
instance, exchanging the word “minger” with the Portuguese
expression “pessoa feia” and, finally, send it (Figure 5 - VI).
IV
I
V
II
III VI
Figure 4 Interface of the high-fidelity prototype
Thus, the Brazilian will receive an understandable Portuguese
message and will be able to write back following a similar process.
In this similar process the roles of the users are inverted, so the
Brazilian user turns into the sender and the American user turns
into the receiver. In this process the new sender (Brazilian user)
will interact with the commonsense knowledge from the OMCS-
Br semantic network instead of the OMCS one.

IV
I classify the use of slang in four types:
V
II
III VI
Figure 5 Interface while creating a message
The flow of information in the sending process is shown in Figure
6. The arrow I represents the sending of the message in native
language. The system identifies some words or expressions and
uses the common sense semantic network to provide related
concepts. These concepts are translated (arrow II) and all of them
(the concepts and its translation) are returned to the user (arrow
III). Finally, the user can change and edit his message in the
foreign language and send it to the receiver (arrow IV).
Figure 6 Flow of data in the sending process
We believe that this application has three goals but our current
research will focus on the first one. The first goal is to connect
and facilitate the communication between two people that speak
different idioms and thus belong to different cultures. Cultural
Translator and Machine Translator promote this facilitation
because they help the sender to write in a more understandable
way to the receiver. The second goal is the exposure of the user to
a target language learning process. Cultural Translator
collaborates with that task acting like a phrase book, expanding
words and amplifying the vocabulary by translating them. The
third goal is to exposure the sender to a reflection of his own
language. Cultural Translator helps providing alternatives to
187
reformulate her/his original message, exchanging words or
expressions to better translate it.
Our study will be instantiated in the use of slang words. This kind
of words is very common in chats and informal speech. We
(1) Slang that does not have a translated. Example: baranga
(a Portuguese word which means a woman that is not
attractive).
(2) Slang word in the source language that has a translation
but it is not a slang in the target language. Example:
café com leite (coffee with milk, which in Portuguese
means a naïve person).
(3) Slang word in source language that has a translation, the
translated word is slang in target language but with
other meaning. Example: galinha (chicken, which in
Portuguese means a person who dates many girls and in
English means a coward).
(4) Slang that has a translation with the same meaning in
both language. Example: Meu Deus! (My God!, to
express surprise).
The next steps of study will focus on the impact of these kinds of
words in the communication of people with different cultural
backgrounds and how this can contribute with the learning
process of the users. In the next section we present an experiment
involving slang words, common sense and machine translation.
4. FIRST EXPERIMENT
In order to verify whether the use of translation resources can help
users to create messages in foreign language, we conducted an
experiment described below. We want to verify if the
commonsense knowledge presented in ConceptNet has been
somehow useful during the translation process. The hypothesis on
this experiment is that the students/users will adopt some
suggestions from the ConceptNet in order to create or translate a
sentence in the target language.
We have selected five Brazilian students with basic and
intermediate level of English. The task that they were asked to
perform was: “With some given sentences in Brazilian Portuguese
language, provide their translations, which will be sent to an
American person”. A preliminary automatic translation of each
sentence was given as a suggestion to them. There were also
available some cards containing a list of synonyms to some words.
We have emphasized that these two resources were suggestions
and the students could either accept them or not.
The experiment was applied in individual sessions so that none of
the students were aware of what the others answered. The students
were expected to write in a sheet of paper the entire translated
sentences that they considered to be understandable by a foreign
person. We could neither answer questions related to the
translation process nor comment whether the translation was
correct.
We have chosen five Brazilian Portuguese sentences that
illustrated the use of slang words. Four of the five sentences
represented the four types of slang use mentioned in section 3.4.
The last sentence did not contain slang words, but contains words
that did not have a translation (they were specific objects from
Brazilian culture).
We emphasize that the content of the sentences can be very 5 feijoada, caipirinha
offensive because of the meaning of the slang words. We do not
necessarily share the same idea expressed by the sentences. The
choice of the slang words used in the sentences was based purely Table 3. Example of card with common sense knowledge
on cultural issues without regarding moral values. They are part of
the informal vocabulary of Brazil found in blogs and internet Tribufu
chats and they address good examples of cultural translation. algo muito feio something very ugly
The translated words and sentences presented in this experiment mulher fora do padrão de woman outside the standard of
were provided by Google Translate, on May 26th, 2010. The beleza beauty
original sentences in Brazilian Portuguese and their automatic
translations in English are presented in Table 1. baranga slapper
Table 1. Original sentences and their translation mulher sem beleza woman without beauty
Number Original Sentence / Translated Sentence horrorosa horrible
1 Aquela maria-chuteira é um tribufu. It is interesting to observe that some slang words have more than
That maria-boot is a tribufu one meaning and that the semantic network came with all
meanings. For example, the word “galinha” (chicken) is related to
2 Meu vizinho tem uma namorada que parece um cão the concepts “small bird” and “womanizer”. The user can choose
chupando manga. the appropriated meaning that fits her/his translation. The results
My neighbor has a girlfriend that looks like a dog of the experiment will be listed in the next section.
sucking mango
5. RESULTS
3 Jogadores de futebol são muito galinhas e ficam
We asked a non-native English teacher to grade all the translated
com muitas meninas
sentences. The variables that he considered in the rating were
Football players are too many chick and stay with grammar and comprehension. The grades vary from 1 to 5 where
girls the grade 1 means a very poor translation and 5 a very good one.

4 O casal passou a lua de mel em Nova Iorque In the first sentence, three of five students changed the expression
“maria-chuteira” to one of the suggested card. Another student
The couple spent their honey moon in New York changed the word to another of her/his knowledge. The last
5 Os brasileiros gostam muito de comer feijoada e student let the term unchanged. Another word edited was
beber caipirinha. “tribufu” which all students adopted the same synonym (horrible)
presented in Table 3. The students’ translated sentences and their
The Brazilians are very fond of eating feijoada and grades can be seen in Table 4.
caipirinha drink.
Table 4. Translations of the first sentence
For each sentence we performed a search in the OMCS-Br
Translated sentence Grade
semantic network looking for words or expressions that were
considered slang words, using the algorithm described in section That maria-boot is a tribufu 1
3.2. The result of that algorithm is shown in Table 2. For each
expression in Table 2, we have made cards containing a list of Student 1 That woman interested in football 2
related words linked through the Minsky’s relation “Defined As”. player is a horrible
These cards also contained synonyms provided Microsoft Office Student 2 That woman who likes football player 3
Word 2007 Synonym Dictionary6. All synonyms were listed in the is a horrible
same card, therefore the students were not aware of the different
sources the words might have. An example of a card that Student 3 That woman interested in soccer player 4
described the word “tribufu” (sentence 1) is shown in Table 3. is horrible

Table 2. Slang words of the original sentences Student 4 That soccer-player groupie is horrible 5
Sentence Words or expressions Student 5 That maria-boot is a horrible 2
1 maria-chuteira, tribufu It is important to note that the students 1, 2, 5 made some
grammatical errors when creating the translated sentence. In first
2 cão chupando manga
sentence, for instance, “…is a horrible” is not grammatically
3 galinha, ficar correct. We observed that the sentences written by the students
had a higher score than the one translated by Google.
4 lua de mel
The second translated sentences are shown in Table 5. The
expression “cão chupando manga” (dog sucking mango) was
edited by all the students even though it has a literal translation.
6
http://office.microsoft.com/pt-br/word/default.aspx

188
These results showed us that some sentences were not well which did not have problems in translation. In the end, the
constructed and still had problems in comprehension. students did not modify the translated message.
Table 5. Translations of the second sentence In the sentence five, we did not choose slang words to compose
the original sentence. Instead, we choose words that designated
Translated sentence Grade
cultural things and could not be translated, for instance, kinds of
My neighbor has a girlfriend that looks 2 dishes. This was a test to expand our experiment and observe the
like a dog sucking mango impact of commonsense knowledge in other kinds of words.
Student 1 My neighbor has a girlfriend that is very 5 The semantic network could provide only one term related to the
ugly person word “feijoada”, saying that it is a food: “defined-as(feijoada,
Student 2 My neighbor has a girlfriend that looks 2 food)”. The word “caipirinha” has two meanings: one is used to
like very ugly designate a hick while the other meaning is the name of an
alcoholic drink in Brazil. At the moment of the experiment the
Student 3 My neighbor has a girlfriend that is very 5
semantic network of OMCS-Br and Microsoft Word Dictionary
ugly
only provided terms related to the first sense (hick). The translated
Student 4 My neighbor has a girlfriend that looks 4 sentences are shown on Table 7.
very ugly
Table 7. Results of the fifth sentence
Student 5 My neighbor has a girlfriend that looks 2
like very ugly Translated sentence Grade

The third sentence was the most difficult to translated. The results, The Brazilians are very fond of eating 3
presented in Table 6, showed some interesting issues. One of feijoada and caipirinha drink.
them is the use of the word “soccer” and “football”. Only two The Brazilians like very of eating 4
Student 1
students (3, 4) noted the difference about these words while the “feijoada” (traditional food) and drink
others kept the translation provided by the machine translation. “caipirinha” (traditional drink)
The student 2 created a new sentence with the same meaning but
without using any suggested resource. Some examples of Student 2 The Brazilians like to eat food made of 5
expressions suggested by ConceptNet to the word “galinha” beans and pork named “feijoada”. They
(chick) and that were used in the translation process were like to drink “caipirinha” that is made of
“womanizer”, “flirt”, “surface dating”. The Microsoft Word lemon, alcohol (cachaça), sugar and ice.
Dictionary provided synonyms for the word “ficar” (stay) but
none of them were used in this case. Student 3 The Brazilians like very much eating 5
“feijoada” (a typical food made of beans
Table 6. Translations of the third sentence and pork) and drinking caipirinha
Translated sentence Grade (alcoholic drinking made of lemon, ice
and sugar)
Football players are too many chick and 1
stay with girls Student 4 The Brazilians like too much a mix of 4
beans and pork meat and drink caipirinha
Student 1 Football players are many womanizer and 4
surface dating with many girls Student 5 The Brazilians are very fond of eating 4
food tipic (feijoada) and caipirinha drink
Student 2 Football players like to have a lot of 3
woman Analyzing the content of the students’ sentences, we noted that
the commonsense knowledge was helpful in some situations. This
Student 3 Soccer players are womanizer and date 5 experiment showed us that the students analyze what is suggested
many girls and perceived that some automatic translations needed a
reformulation. In our examples the commonsense knowledge was
Student 4 Football/soccer players are very flirt and 2
more useful than the Microsoft Word Synonyms Dictionary. This
stay with several girls
happened because the sentences contained words which meaning
Student 5 Football players are too flirt and surface 4 depends on cultural factors (for instance, slang words). These
dating with girls words were chosen due the fact they are very common in a chat or
conversation between Brazilian people.
The fourth sentence (O casal passou a lua de mel em Nova
Iorque) received 5 points. All the students wrote the following
translation: “The couple spent their honeymoon in New York” 6. CONCLUSION
(the same provided by Google Translate). The students 1 and 5 This work presented a prototype an application called Culture-to-
had some questions about the word “lua de mel” (honey moon) Chat, or C2C, aiming at promoting a better comprehensive
because they perceive that the literal meaning of this expression communication between users with different cultural background.
can cause confusion in another culture. The semantic network of Specifically, the application is to support the chat between people
OMCS-Br and Microsoft Word Dictionary do not provided (at with two different language background: Portuguese and English
that moment) any suggestion about the expression “honeymoon”. focused on end-to-end communication between people with
They only suggested terms related to the world “passar” (spend) rudimentary and intermediary knowledge of the second language

189
using computer support rather than using a simple connection
with automated computer translation. We are proposing a
methodology that adopts machine translation combined to a
cultural knowledgebase with additional concepts and words
presented to the user after a first automatic translation. These
concepts and words can be selected from a list of translations that
can be better suited to the intention of the message, in order to
help users on translating properly certain cultural expressions
used in the vocabulary for their chat. The cultural knowledge
expressed as commonsense knowledge is collected by the OMCS-
Br project and the American OMCS projects as well. Preliminary
tests show that our proposal can be effective for certain situations
and users could work better on expanding their own vocabulary in
the second language and consequently having a better translated
message using this technique than using only the machine
translation support. Although the results are not sufficient to
measure the real impact of the proposed approach, they give some
evidences that it works in specific situations. As future work,
according to the results presented here, the prototype is evolving
from a desktop prototype to a web application working with
Google Translate (instead of SMT Moses Toolkit). Therefore, we
can perform some experiments to analyze how the combination of
cultural knowledge and machine translation can impact on the
communication between users with different cultural background.
7. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The authors thank to CAPES and FAPESP for partial financial
support to this research. We also thank all the collaborators of the
Open Mind Common Sense Project who have been building the
common sense knowledge base considered in this research.
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