Hybrid Approaches to Machine Translation - Marie Curie EXPERT Summer School

Two of our members involved in developing hybrid approaches to machine translation took part in the last Marie Curie EXPERT Summer School meeting in Dublin, from 29th August to 2nd September, 2014. Pangeanic was one of the appointed coordinators of the event together with the University of Wolverhampton and Dublin City University, Mr. Alex Helle and Mr. Manuel Herranz presented on two subjects "Project management from an industrial perspective" and "Publication Strategies" to the young and experienced researchers part of the research team which is working at several European universities. The first presentation dealt with the needs researchers may one day face as managers of project teams at Universities or at private industry. Click on the following link to obtain a copy of the Project Management presentation at EXPERT.

Pangeanic's presentation project management from an industrial perspective

The second presentation by Pangeanic dealt with the different publication strategies, channels and methods researchers have to face and why some channels need more precaution than others. Alex Helle touched upon free and commercial tools available to researchers, too. [caption id="attachment_1921" align="alignleft" width="150"]

Pangeanic's presentation Publication Strategies[/caption] The second presentation Pangeanic Publication Strategies at EXPERT is also freely available for download. During the 4-day event at DCU, Early Stage Researchers also presented progress of their research over the 2nd year. This Marie Curie action by the European Union (grant agreement no. 317471) aims to go beyond existing corpus-based Translation Memory and Machine Translation technologies by addressing the shortcomings of both of them. This is done by researching the use of more sophisticated levels of linguistic processing, terminology and domain knowledge in several language pairs. Mr Alex Helle co-ordinated PangeaMT presentations with the University of Sheffield and the University of Saarland. Leading European Universities like the University of Wolverhampton, Malaga University, Sheffield University, the University of Saarland and the University of Amsterdam take part in the young researcher’s training for EXPERT. Young researchers will also stage periods at commercial companies like Hermes, Pangeanic and Translated where their experimental hybrid machine translation technologies and translation studies will be tested and applied. The programme at the DCU event covered, among other topics:

Grant proposal writing and research policy (led by UvA, supported by DCU)
Project Management (led by Pangeanic, supported by USAAR).
Research planning and supervision (led by USFD, supported by Pangeanic).
Publication strategies (led by Pangeanic, supported by UoW)
Communication (led by USFD, supported by DCU)
Entrepreneurship (led by Hermes, supported by USAAR).
Intellectual property (led by Translated, supported by UMA)
Transfer of technology to market and commercial exploitation of results (led by Translated, supported by UoW).
Ethics (led by Hermes, supported by UMA).

As part of its dissemination strategy, Pangeanic presented at poster and provided description of the hybrid machine translation project at the European Machine Translation Association gathering (Nice, 2013). The EXPERT project aims to minimize human translators’ effort and tailoring systems according to their needs. This means that there can be different levels of “assistance” to be provided in a user-friendly workflow. Throughout the EXPERT project, consideration will be given to different user requirements and user feedback in order to improve translation quality and user satisfaction of several machine translation outputs. Researchers will also work on methods to quickly develop new language pairs, including resource-poor languages. Researchers coming to PangeaMT will make use of the PangeaMT platform as a starting point for data cleaning, engine creation in several language pairs as well as experimentation of hybrid machine translation technologies and hypothesis.

PROJECT DESCRIPTION

The EXPERT (EXPloiting Empirical appRoaches to Translation) project aims to train young researchers (Early Stage Researchers or ESRs) and Experienced Researchers (ERs) with a view to promote the research, development and use of hybrid machine translation technologies and test their hypothesis for the improvement of machine translation techniques and adoption by industry and practitioners. 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 who have been carefully selected. There are:

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 India, China, Russia, Brazil and several other countries. They participate in an integrated research programme consisting of 15 individual projects. They also attend the training programme with presentations by Universities and industrial partners, 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