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EuroMatrix: Statistical and Hybrid Machine Translation Between All European Languages

Projektbeschreibung


Multimodal Interfaces
Teaching computers to translate

An ambitious project to develop software capable of automatically translating between the European Union’s 23 official languages promises to help governments, businesses and citizens communicate more easily and cheaply.

Called Moses, the open source software is being developed by a team of researchers in the EUROMATRIX project. They aim to provide the EU’s private and public sectors with the means to translate documents quickly and accurately between any of the 27-nation bloc’s language pairs.

To achieve that goal, the researchers are relying on innovative technologies to take machine translation beyond the current state of the art.

Billions of euros spent on translations

Currently, European governments, European institutions, companies and citizens spend billions of euros a year employing an army of translators to translate legislation, business documents and legal papers between European languages.

The workload has more than doubled in recent years as the EU has gone from 15 Member States to 27 and from 11 official languages to 23.

Machine translation, in which computers rather than people do the work, has been an option for years, although its poor quality has generally made it unviable for anything but the most rudimentary uses.

As anyone who has ever attempted to translate text on the internet knows, the output of many automated systems is often littered with punctuation errors, misplaced words and grammatical mistakes that can make the text almost unintelligible.

Developing a viable alternative to human translators

To make machine translation a viable alternative to human translation, the EUROMATRIX researchers saw the need for a new approach. Instead of simply following the path of earlier systems, which translate texts using a set of predefined linguistic rules and a constrained lexicon, the EUROMATRIX team developed software to allow the computer to learn to translate from past work and experience.

In essence, the approach relies on the computer program referring to an existing body of translated text and using statistical analysis to determine how words are used.

The internet makes finding the necessarily vast body of existing translations easy, allowing the system to draw on texts in different languages to greatly improve the accuracy of translations over uniquely rule-based approaches.

The researchers have also investigated a hybrid approach, merging both statistical and rule-based systems.

Translation workshops and commercial interest

In order to demonstrate Moses, the EUROMATRIX team has organised a series of workshops involving universities across Europe, while the open source software itself has already elicited commercial interest.

Moses is currently being used by several big European organisations as well as some small and medium businesses, according to the project partners.

EUROMATRIX aims at a major push in machine translation technology applying themost advanced MT technologies systematically to all pairs of EUlanguages. Special attention will be paid to the languages of the new andnear-term prospective member states. As part of this application development,EUROMATRIX will design and investigate novel combinations of statisticaltechniques and linguistic knowledge sources as well as hybrid MT architectures.In contrast to research funded by DARPA and ARDA with focus on non-Europeanlanguages, EUROMATRIX will address urgent European economic and social needs byconcentrating on European languages and on high-quality translation to beemployed for the publication of technical, social, legal and politicaldocuments.EUROMATRIX will enrich the statistical MT approach with novel learningparadigms and experiment with new combinations of methods and resources fromstatistical MT, rule-based MT, shallow language processing and computationallexicography/morphology.EUROMATRIX has the following concrete objectives: Translation systems for allpairs of EU languages, with a special focus on the languages of new andnear-term prospective member states; Efficient inclusion of linguisticknowledge into statistical machine translation; The development and testing ofhybrid architectures for the integration of rule-based and statisticalapproaches; Organization, analysis and interpretation of a competitive annualinternational evaluation of machine translation with a strong focus on Europeaneconomic and social needs; The provision of open source machine translationtechnology including research tools, software and data; A systematicallycompiled and constantly updated detailed survey of the state of MT technologyfor all EU language pairs based on the developed systematic translation betweenall EU languages, the comparative MT evaluations and an inventory of availableand needed tools, components, lingware and data.

Wissenschaftliches Gebiet

Programm/Programme

Thema/Themen

Aufforderung zur Vorschlagseinreichung

FP6-2005-IST-5
Andere Projekte für diesen Aufruf anzeigen

Finanzierungsplan

STREP - Specific Targeted Research Project

Koordinator

UNIVERSITAT DES SAARLANDES
EU-Beitrag
€ 813 000,00
Adresse
CAMPUS
66123 Saarbrucken
Deutschland

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Region
Saarland Saarland Regionalverband Saarbrücken
Aktivitätstyp
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
Links
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Keine Daten

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Letzte Aktualisierung: 31 März 2017

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Permalink: https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/034291/de

European Union, 2024