Hybrid Machine Translation Technologies - Marie Curie EXPERT year 2

PangeaMT is a co-organizer, together with Dublin City University (DCU) of EXPERT's 2nd training event on hybrid machine translation technologies which will take place in Dublin immediately after COLING 2014 from 30th August to 2nd September. The focus of this second EXPERT event is to provide training on Complementary Skills, covering topics like intellectual property, grant proposal writing and research policy, publication strategies (presentation by Mr Alex Helle from PangeaMT), etc. During the 4-day event at DCU, Early Stage Researchers will also present the 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 by researching the use of more sophisticated levels of linguistic processing, terminology and domain knowledge in several language pairs. Mr Alex Helle will co-ordinate PangeaMT presentations with the University of Sheffield and the University of Saarland, representing PangeaMT presentation on Publication Strategies. Leading European Universities like the University of Wolverhampton, Malaga University, Sheffield University, Saarland, the University of Amsterdam take part in the yound researcher's training for EXPERT, with stage periods at commercial companies like Hermes, Pangeanic and Translated where their experimental hybrid machine translation technologies will be tested and applied. The programme for the Dublin event covers, 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).

Experienced and young researchers work together in a 4 year programme focused on the creation of hybrid machine translation technologies. Pangeanic presented at poster and provided description of the hybrid machine translation project at the European Machine Translation Association meeting in Nice in 2013. 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