Skip to main content
European Commission logo
English English
CORDIS - EU research results
CORDIS
CORDIS Web 30th anniversary CORDIS Web 30th anniversary

Machine Translation Impact on Language Learning

Project description

Machines break language barriers

An easy and fast way to translate a text is to have a machine do the job online - instantly. Machine translation (MT) systems use machine-learning technologies to translate hundreds of billions of words online daily. The EU-funded MTrill project will examine the impact of MT systems on the learning and processing of English as a second language. As regards language acquisition, the research will focus on language binding – the ability to combine single words properly in a sentence. The project will conduct a syntactic priming experiment. Here, participants will be tested on whether they produce the same syntactic structures that had been previously seen during an MT task.

Objective

The MTrill is a process-oriented research that aims at investigating how online freely available Machine Translation (MT) systems are impacting the acquisition and processing of English as a second language. The research will shed light on issues involving a central aspect of language acquisition: the so-called language binding, i.e. the ability to combine single words properly in a grammatical sentence in a second language. To pursue this goal, a syntactic priming experiment will be carried out in which participants will be tested as whether they produce the same syntactic structures that had been previously seen during a translation task using a MT. The project brings a brand-new methodological approach within MT process-oriented evaluation research and it goes beyond the existing state-of-the-art approaches since it will focus on translation processing complemented by product analysis (oral production). The project will be conducted under the supervision of Professor Andy Way and Doctor Monica Ward in the ADAPT Centre based in Dublin City university. A four-months secondment will be carried out in the Max Planck Institute of Psycholinguistics (MPI) in Nijmegen, The Netherlands, in the Neurobiology of Language research group under the supervision of Professor Peter Hagoort. The knowledge acquired during the secondment will be consolidated in the return phase through implementation of the experiments carried out for this project as well as through teaching and co-supervision activities. Results of this research will be disseminated through conferences and journal paper publications and will be communicated to multiple audiences through articles published in non-academic magazines, blogs and social media. The fellowship will attract academic networking opportunities, skill-set improvements and a personal and professional transformative experience to the researcher since it will establish her as the new leading light in research of an interdisciplinary field.

Coordinator

DUBLIN CITY UNIVERSITY
Net EU contribution
€ 184 590,72
Address
Glasnevin
9 Dublin
Ireland

See on map

Region
Ireland Eastern and Midland Dublin
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
Links
Total cost
€ 184 590,72