EuroMatrixPlus · Bringing Machine Translation for European Languages to the User

Europe faces a growing economic and societal challenge due to its vast diversity of languages, and machine translation (MT) technology holds promise as a means to address this challenge. EuroMatrix Plus will<br/>- continue the rapid advance of MT technology, creating example systems for every official EU language, and providing other MT developers with our infrastructure for building statistical translation models,<br/>- continue and broaden the controlled systematic investigation of different approaches and techniques to accellerate the scientific evolution of novel methods, including both selection and crossfertilization. The aim is to to arrive at scientifically well understood novel combinations of methods that are provenly superior to the state of the art,<br/>- contribute to the growth and competitiveness of the European MT research scene and infrastructure through open evaluations and living community supported surveys of resources, tools, systems and their respective capabilities,<br/>- focus on bringing MT to the users, in addition to focusing on scientific advances. Because our statistical models are derived from example translations, we can build and exploit a synergistic relationship in which users suggest improvements to the system by post-editing its output, and the system improves itself by learning from user feedback.<br/>EuroMatrix Plus focuses on two types of users: professional translators and translation agencies working for private corporations, administrations, and other organisations, and lay users who create content on a volunteer basis by translating foreign materials into their own languages. We will investigate how these users can benefit from state of the art in MT, and conversely, how MT can benefit from user corrections, and create an openly accessible sample application that enables users to automatically translate news stories and web pages from any EU language into any other, and whose corrections will be exploited for improving MT technology.