EXPERT Hybrid Machine Translation - Dublin September 2014

Pangeanic's Alex Helle and Manuel Herranz will represent the company in this Marie Curie action by the European Union that aims to improve existing corpus-based TM and MT technologies by addressing their well-known shortcomings through the use of more sophisticated levels of linguistic processing, terminology and domain knowledge. The company is responsible for providing presentations on publication strategies, as well as supporting two more presentations with the University of Sheffield and the University of Saarland. At EXPERT, experienced and young researchers will work together over the 4 year programme focusing on research to create hybrid machine translation technologies where the main features of corpus-based approaches are incorporated. The project aims to minimize human translators’ effort and tailoring systems according to their needs. This will be done by allowing different levels of “assistance” to be provided in a user-friendly workflow. Throughout the project, consideration will be given to user requirements and feedback in order to improve translation quality and user satisfaction of machine translation output, as well as allowing quick development for new language pairs, including resource-poor languages. The PangeaMT platform will be used as a starting point for data cleaning, engine creation, and experimentation of hybrid machine translation. The second training event will be held in Dublin immediately after COLING 2014 between 30th August and 2nd September. The focus of the event is to provide training on complementary skills, covering topics like intellectual property, grant proposal writing and research policy, publication strategies, etc. In addition, Early Stage Researchers will present the progress of their research on the 2nd year.

The EXPERT (EXPloiting Empirical appRoaches to Translation) project aims to train young researchers, namely Early Stage Researchers (ESRs) and also Experienced Researchers (ERs) to promote the research, development and use of hybrid machine translation technologies. The overall objective of EXPERT is to provide innovative research and training in the field of Translation memory and Machine Translation Technologies to 15 Marie Curie Fellows:

12 PhD students (Early Stage Researchers - ESR) with 36 month contracts
3 post-doctoral researchers (Experienced Researchers - ER) with 24 month contracts

The 15 Fellows come from Brazil, Russia, India, China and several other countries. They will participate in an integrated research programme of 15 individual projects and also will have access to the training programme, which consists of four large training events:

Scientific and technological training (year 1)
Complementary skills training (year 2)
Scientific and technological workshop (year 3)
Business showcase (year 4)

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development and demonstration under grant agreement no. 317471