Congratulations to Sara Morrissey

Congratulations to Sara Morrissey who successfully defended her thesis and will be awarded the degree of PhD.

The title of Sara's thesis is "Data-Driven Machine Translation for Sign Languages".

She completed her PhD in the National Centre for Language Technology (NCLT), and the School of Computing, DCU under the supervision of Professor Andy Way.

Sara is now working as a post-doctoral researcher with the Centre for Next Generation Localisation (CNGL), at DCU. In this post Sara will work with Prof. Harold Somers on Machine Translation for Patients with Limited English. She will also continue her sign language work, as well as working with minority spoken languages.

Brief description of Project:
With only ~1% of the Irish non-Deaf population being able to communicate in Irish Sign Language (ISL), most Deaf people not being confident in their English skills, and very few public services available through ISL, Deaf people face communication and comprehension barriers on a daily basis. A lack of interpreter availability coupled with confidentiality issues, as well as the English-language dependency of subtitling and teletype system mean that these services cannot always overcome these barriers. This thesis presents the development of data-driven machine translation (MT) technology using DCU’s MaTrEx MT system to address these communication problems. We have created a bidirectional multi-lingual translation system for sign languages (SLs) in the domain of airport information that includes gesture recognition and animation technology components to translate both to and from SLs.

This project was generously funded by the Irish Research Council for Science, Engineering and Technology (IRCSET) and IBM

Congratulations to Karolina Owczarzak

Congratulations to Karolina Owczarzak who successfully defended her thesis and will be awarded the degree of PhD.

The title of Karolina's thesis is "A Novel Dependency-Based Evaluation Metric for Machine Translation".

She completed her PhD in the National Centre for Language Technology (NCLT), and the School of Computing, DCU under the supervision of Professor Josef van Genabith and Professor Andy Way.

Karolina will soon begin her new post as a guest researcher at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Gaithersburg, MD, USA, working on evaluation methods for automatic summaries.

Brief description of Project:
In the development of Machine Translation (MT) systems, automatic evaluation metrics allow developers to conduct frequent, fast, and cost-effective evaluations of their translation models. However, most of the metrics rely on a comparison of word strings, measuring only the surface similarity of the candidate and reference translations. A candidate translation expressing the source meaning accurately and fluently will be given a low score if the lexical and syntactic choices it contains, even though legitimate, are not present in at least one of the references. This thesis presents a method that automatically evaluates the quality of translation based on the labelled dependency structure of the sentence, rather than on its surface form. This lets us compare the translation and the reference on the level of shallow semantic relations, and the score obtained in this way reflects human judgment of translation quality better than most existing metrics.

This project was generously funded by Enterprise Ireland (EI) and Microsoft Ireland.

DCU to lead Multi-Million Euro Research in High-Tech Automatic Language Translation

Dublin City University is to lead a multi-million euro research partnership funded by Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) that will develop the next generation of high tech automatic language translation.

This five-year research programme will transform an important sector of Ireland’s global software business – localisation - as well as a key driver of the global content distribution industry.

DCU is collaborating in the project with academic partners, UCD, UL and TCD, and with renowned global technology leaders, IBM, Microsoft, Symantec, Dai Nippon Printing, and Idiom Technologies as well as key Irish SMEs, Alchemy, VistaTech, SpeechStorm and Traslan.

The Minister for Enterprise and Employment, Michael Martin, today announced the award of €16.8m to the project by SFI, and the industry partners are contributing €13.6m in materials, research services and additional funding.

Ireland already has a substantial global footprint in the localisation industry – the process of adapting digital content, download manuals, software and other materials, to different languages and cultures.

The President of DCU, Professor Ferdinand von Prondzynski, said: ”This welcome funding is a great endorsement of DCU’s international research capability. It means that DCU is now leading two SFI Centres for Science, Engineering and Technology (CSETs) – in biomedical diagnostics and localisation technology – that have won the largest-ever SFI funding in the state”

The Irish project will tackle three critical problems for the Localisation Industry:

• Volume: The amount of content to be translated and localised to the destination culture and environment is growing rapidly and massively outstrips the supply of human translators.
• Access: Powerful, small devices such as mobile phones and PDAs require novel technologies integrating speech and text to support “on the move” delivery of, and access to multilingual information.
• Personalisation : A new demand has rapidly emerged for the adaptation of a huge amount of multilingual content now available on the web, for individual needs . It needs “instant” localisation and personalisation to meet the demands of the users.

Professor Josef van Genabith, Director of the new Centre said: "Localisation as an industrial process was developed in Ireland. We have a unique concentration of university- and industry-based research and development expertise in language technologies, machine translation, speech processing, digital content management and localisation. The research centre is going to pool that expertise and develop the next generation of language and content management technologies to support and develop the localisation industry.”