News Archive

NCLT/CNGL Seminar Series 2011

User-focused task-oriented MT evaluation for wikis: a case study (JEC paper)

Date: Wednesday, 12 October 2011
Time: 16:00
Venue: L2.21

Presenters: Federico Gaspari (joint work with Antonio Toral and Sudip Kumar Naskar)

This paper reports on an evaluation experiment focusing on statistical machine
translation (MT) software integrated into a more complex system for the synchronization of multilingual information contained in wiki sites. The experiment focused on the translation of wiki entries from German and Dutch into English carried out by ten media professionals, editors, journalists and translators working at two major media organizations who post-edited the MT output.

The investigation concerned in particular the adequacy of MT to support the translation of wiki pages, and the results in-clude both its success rate (i.e. MT effectiveness) and the associated confidence of the users (i.e. their satisfaction). Special emphasis is laid on the post-editing effort required to bring the output to publishable standard.

The results show that overall the users were satisfied with the system and regarded it as a potentially useful tool to support their work; in particular, they found that the post-editing effort required to attain translated wiki entries in English of publishable quality was lower than translating from scratch.

Full schedule of NCLT/CNGL Seminars 2011

Exhibitors and speakers offer assistance for international business growth

Dublin, Ireland – Oct., 05, 2011 – The Rosetta Foundation, a world leading organisation that supports the not-for-profit activities of the localization and translation communities, is exhibiting at this fall’s Localization World Silicon Valley 2011 international business conference in Booth 118. The conference, produced by MultiLingual Computing, Inc. and The Localization Institute, will be held October 10-12 in Santa Clara, Calif. The exhibit hall will be open October 11 from 8:00 am – 5:00 pm and October 12, from 9:00 am – 3:30 pm.

Localization World 2011 brings together more than 500 attendees, including top vendors and experts from leading industries and social media from around the world to share their knowledge of how companies can succeed internationally and also reach multicultural and multiethnic audiences within their home countries. In addition to seminars and exhibits, there will be two evening networking events providing opportunities for attendees to establish alliances and partnerships.

“The Rosetta Foundation is exhibiting at Localization World 2011 because we recognize that this is a key conference for companies that want to grow their global business,” says Reinhard Schäler, CEO of the Rosetta Foundation. “We will be running, in conjunction with the CNGL, a special half-day open pre-conference session at Localization World on 10 October entitled ‘Give up the Illusion of Control’. We would encourage anyone interested in learning about, contributing to and becoming a part of the Social Localization Network being built by CNGL and the Rosetta Foundation to attend and help shape this emerging sector of our industry. Our exhibit at booth 118 of the exhibition hall will be open throughout the conference for people to come down, talk to us and volunteer or get information about the Rosetta Foundation, CNGL and the LRC.”

Localization, the art and science of adapting products, services and communications to an international language or culture so as to appear native to any region, is a vital function for global success. The conference program offers five concurrent tracks: Global Business Best Practices, Managing Global Websites, Core Localization Competencies, Advanced Localization Management and The Inside Track, with special format sessions designed to stimulate collaboration. Programs and exhibits are directed to both customers and vendors.

Highlighted speakers include a keynote by Sarah Lacy, author and senior editor at TechCrunch.com, the largest blog on tech entrepreneurship in the world. Full program details and speakers’ biographies are available at http://www.localizationworld.com/lwsv2011/speakers.php.

Event sponsors include Lionbridge, Across, Jonckers, Moravia Worldwide, Welocalize and XLATED. To register: http://www.localizationworld.com/lwsv2011/registration.php.

About The Rosetta Foundation

The Rosetta Foundation is a spin-off of the Localisation Research Centre (LRC) at the University of Limerick (UL), Ireland, and the Centre for Next Generation Localisation (CNGL), a major research initiative supported by the Irish Government and industry. The Rosetta Foundation was launched at the AGIS ’09 event in Limerick, Ireland, on September 21–23, 2009 by the President of the University of Limerick, Prof. Don Barry. Action for Global Information Sharing (AGIS) is an annual international event to promote knowledge and information sharing across languages, co-organized by The Rosetta Foundation. AGIS ’11 will take place on 01-02 December 2011 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and will be hosted by the United Nations Economic Division for Africa (UNECA). For more information on AGIS, visit www.agis11.org. For more information on The Rosetta Foundation, visit www.TheRosettaFoundation.org or email info@TheRosettaFoundation.org.

Note to reporters and editors: Press passes are available with official press credentials by contacting Kevin Watson at 208-263-8178.

Contact:
Reinhard Schäler
Email info@therosettafoundation.org
Tel. +353-87-6736414

Localization World Silicon Valley 2011
Pre-conference Workshop (attendance is free)

Monday, 10 October 2011
13:30 – 17:30

P13: Give Up the Illusion of Control: How to Support User-driven, Needs-based Translation and Localization Scenarios!
Presented by: Eoin Ó Conchúir (LRC/CNGL), Reinhard Schäler (The Rosetta Foundation and LRC/CNGL)

Synopsis
What has long been a reality in many IT areas is now becoming a reality in translation — users are taking control. They start translation projects, they collaborate across continents, and they care about their translations, but they are not concerned about business cases.

In this session, we will discuss how user-driven, needs-based scenarios can be supported by technology. What are the requirements for this technology? How are they different from the well-known and understood mainstream? Who are the users of this technology? Where are they located and what are their profiles? What motivates them to dedicate large amounts of their time to provide free translations? How can needs-driven scenarios be developed and sustained long-term?

This session will be presented by the Centre for Next Generation Localisation and The Rosetta Foundation, and will draw on their experiences and collaborations with the African Network for Localisation, the Asian PAN Localisation Network, the UN's Economic Commission for Africa, as well as with nonprofit organizations, small and medium-sized enterprises from around the world. The aim of the session is to share experiences and to discuss strategies for further development and collaboration.

Background
With the support of a significant number of enterprises (profit and not-for-profit) and the Centre for Next Generation Localisation (CNGL), two workshops took place this year: The Rosetta Design Fest (February 2011) and The Rosetta Deployment Fest (March 2011). Over the past months, researchers within the CNGL have been working on demonstrator systems for the ideas developed at these workshops. They are now ready for review, feedback and discussion. This is also the appropriate time to discuss and agree how we can leverage the power of community for the creation of a sustainable framework to support social localisation technology development and deployment.

About
The Centre for Next Generation Localisation (CNGL) is a dynamic Academia-Industry partnership with over 100 researchers developing novel technologies addressing the key localisation challenges of volume, access and personalisation.
The Rosetta Foundation aims to relieve poverty, support healthcare, develop education and promote justice through access to information and knowledge across the languages of the world. It is a University of Limerick and the CNGL spin-off.

Further information: LRC@ul.ie, info@cngl.ie or info@therosettafoundation.org 
Agenda
Our vision is to make technology available that empowers social localisation.

The goal of this session is to
• Review the context of Social Localisation
• Highlight the new technology requirements for Social Localisation
• Demonstrate two approaches of Social Localisation Technology: Solas and TeX
• Discuss and agree
- A mission and a vision statement, as well as goals for the Development of Social Localisation Technology;
- A strategy to involve user communities;
- The mechanics of collaboration on a Social Localisation Technology ecosystem;
- Addressing issues around sustainability of this effort;
- An Action Plan.

Agenda

13:30 Welcome
CNGL and The Rosetta Foundation

13:45 Give up the Illusion of Control: 21st Century Localisation is Social
“I don't think it's crazy to ask if your CEO is the next Mubarak. The elites--or managers in companies--no longer control the conversation. This is how insurrections start”, says Gary Hamel, ranked by the Wall Street Journal as the world’s most influential business thinker. Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, brings it to the point: "This isn't just about Arab Spring. This is about corporate spring." We add: This is about the localisation spring. Ethan McCarty, Senior Manager of Digital and Social Strategy at IBM (FastCompany, 11 Sep 2011) believes that “social media will be dwarfed by social business”. We add: mainstream translation will be dwarfed by social localisation. Communities will take control of localisation and introduce radical change to the industry. What is our role in this scenario?

14:15 How Technology can support Social Localisation
Through information technology, information can be shared globally in real time. Communicating one-to-one has never been easier. Yet, supporting complex collaborative processes such - such as social localisation - is still a grand challenge. We must ask ourselves how to support community-driven localisation, what user interfaces should be available for which technologies (and why), whether non-professional translators can be leveraged, and how to motivate such individuals.

14:35 SOLAS
Software-Oriented Localisation Architecture Solution (SOLAS) is a platform for user-driven localisation. With it, we aim to give control back to the content developer by letting them lead their localisation process. SOLAS is a new approach to localisation: rather than a centralised server-based process, this distributed component-based localisation platform can leverage automation and community involvement through a range of components.

14:55 Translation eXchange (TeX)
Translation eXchange aims to support community-driven localisation. If it were to have 10,000s volunteer translators, and 1,000s of organizations, it's no longer possible to centrally control the localisation process. We explore the practicality of supporting a self-managed localisation community.

15:15 Break

15:30 Discussion (introduced by statement of purpose)
This session will provide a blueprint to the collaborative effort leading to the development of an open, accessible, and sustainable technology ecosystem supporting social localisation.

Mission, Vision and Goals
During this session, we will discuss and agree a mission, the vision and the goal for the development of Social Localisation Technology.

Understanding Social Localisation – User Groups and Requirements
During this session, we will discuss and agree a strategy to involve user communities in the design, review, and validation of our approach to Social Localisation Technology.

Developing the Technology: The Rosetta Foundation Open Source Project
During this session, we will discuss and agree a framework for collaboration with The Rosetta Foundation Open Source Project, the CNGL, and other collaborators.

Sustaining the Effort: Buy-in to Core Activities
During this session, we will discuss and agree a strategy to ensure the sustainability of the coordination and support activities for the research and development efforts.

17:00 Review and Next Steps (including deliverables, milestones, schedule)
During this session, we will discuss and agree a schedule with milestones and deliverables for the coming 12 months.

17:30 Close

Paul Leahy, Senior Director, Worldwide Product Translation Group, Oracle; Reinhard Schäler, Director, Localisation Research Centre; Martin Ørsted, Senior International Project Engineering Manager, Microsoft; and Fred Hollowood, Research Director, SES EMEA, Symantec

Ireland’s potential as a leader in the estimated €18 billion global content industry was highlighted at the Annual Localisation Research Centre Conference, which runs from the 22 - 23 September in Limerick. Established in 1995, the Localisation Research Centre (LRC) is one of four academic partners of the Centre for Next Generation Localisation and is a hub for research in this growing field in Ireland.

Localisation is defined as the translation and adaptation of digital content to other languages, cultures and platforms. Localisation applies to basic word processing software to the latest multimedia computer games to complex software systems across healthcare, education and a range of global industries.

Centre Director, Reinhard Schäler explains the significance of this industry for Ireland:

“There are things that as English speakers we take for granted. Access to and understanding of a range of content across the web, the use of online banking systems, communication in Facebook, being able to sit down at most computers and type using the alphabet we’ve known since childhood. The adaption of all this content for accessibility to a range of languages is a €18 billion industry in which Ireland is one of the global leaders. Ireland was the location for the world’s first and largest US localisation multinational (Lotus) who set up in the mid-1980s supported by the world’s first dedicated service provider, Softrans International and Irish entrepreneur Brian Kelly. The localisation industry grew from there and companies like IBM, Microsoft, Symantec, Correl, Google, and Paypal followed. Ireland soon became the largest exporter of software and our strengths in localisation was the key to this”.

Speaking in advance of the conference, Martin Ørsted, Senior International Project Engineering Manager, Microsoft said:

“For Microsoft localisation is an important investment and Ireland has been a key localisation centre for Microsoft for many years and still is. We are an active participant in the language technology community and value the work the LRC does to continue to grow and build that community.”

The 2 day conference was attended by around 100 delegates from 20 countries and speakers from global leaders in the field: Intel, Symantec, Oracle, Microsoft, Lingotek, Applied Language Solutions, Asian Online, SDL.

The University of Limerick offers the world’s first dedicated postgraduate Localisation Programme, the MSc in Global Computing and Localisation, and is the home of CNGL spin-out activity The Rosetta Foundation, which offers free localisation and translation services to non-profit organisations, including Special Olympics, Trocaire, and Concern and is supported by a community of around 1,000 volunteers. LRC XVI is supported by the Centre of Next Generation Localisation (CNGL), a Centre for Science, Engineering and Technology (CSET), co-funded by Science Foundation Ireland and ten industry partners.

For further information about the LRC XVI Conference, go to www.localisation.ie

The keynote for the 2011 LRC Annual Internationalisation and Localisation Conference will be given by Robert Vandenberg, CEO of Lingotek.

The Future is All About You.

In this talk Robert will focus on the inherent democratizing qualities of the Internet, enabling us all to write blogs, search/find content, translate, communicate globally. Robert will discuss, in the context of language and translation, how the Internet is breaking hierarchical/paternal production models and enabling a more egalitarian model which empowers the individual.

About Robert Vandenberg

As President and CEO of Lingotek, Rob is driving the vision and leading the charge as the company looks to change the future of tranlsation. Prior to being named president of Lingotek in 2008, Vandenberg served as the company's vice president of sales and marketing where he was a source of guidance and inspiration. Rob has never shied away from asking the tough questions that have led to greater understanding, insight and a more progressive development of new products and services.

View the full conference programme

The conference will also feature talks from leading industry experts and a number of breakout sessions and workshops, as well as a panel session looking at the next five years in our industry.

Closing Date for Entries: Friday, 2nd September 2011

The closing date for the 2011 LRC Best Thesis Award, sponsored by Symantec and supported by CNGL, is this Friday, 2nd September 2011. The LRC Best Thesis Award is an annual award given to the author of the best research publication in an area relevant to internationalisation and localisation.

This competition is open to anyone who has completed a research thesis (final year project, Masters or PhD) relevant to internationalisation and localisation within the past two years.

So, if you would like to enter this award and be in with the chance to win €1,000 and one of Symantec's professional retail products, simply send an electronic copy of your thesis, together with your full contact details, a short CV (max. one page) and any relevant information to LRC[AT]ul.ie

The scope of entries for the award need not be confined to a technical or linguistic area, and applications are welcome from students who are carrying out research into any area of localisation.

Possible topics may include but are not limited to:

- Localisation workflows
- Crowd Sourcing in Localisation
- Global Web Design and Content Management
- Machine Translation
- Computer Aided Translation
- Terminology Management
- Internationalisation and Global Software Design

For more information on the award, visit www.localisation.ie

By submitting their work, authors acknowledge the right of the LRC to publish their work should it be awarded the LRC Best Thesis Award, or receive special mention.

LRC XVI

The 16th Annual Internationalisation & Localisation conference organised by the Localisation Research Centre

21-23 September 2011, Limerick, Ireland
In Association with (CNGL)

Registration for the 16th annual Internationalisation and Localisation Conference
organised by the the Localisation Research Centre (LRC) and supported by CNGL is now open.

Discounted registration is available for NGOs, Freelancers & CNGL members and all conference reg­istrations include free attendance at the annual conference dinner on 23rd September.

Register Now

The full programme for the conference will be published in the coming weeks but, in advance of this, the LRC is happy to announce that among the speakers presenting at the event will be:

Smith Yewell — Welocalize

Dion Wiggins — AsiaOnline

Stephen Holmes — Sajan

Paul Leahy — Oracle

Jason Rickard — Symantec

Martin Ørsted — Microsoft

and many more

The conference will also feature a panel session moderated by Fred Hollowood of
Symantec and a number of breakout sessions that will look at a variety of topics ranging from Standards through to collaborative translation and a workshop on Machine Transla­tion.

The full programme and further speakers will be announced in the coming weeks. We look forward to seeing you in September.

Talented young linguists prepare to take on the languages of the world

Dublin, Ireland | 22 July 2011 - Four of Ireland’s brightest young problem solvers are preparing to pit their wits against the world’s toughest puzzles in language, logic and linguistics when they compete in the International Linguistics Olympiad at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, USA from 25-30 July. Team Ireland, which comprises two secondary school students from Northern Ireland and two from the Republic, will go head to head with budding linguists from 19 countries as they attempt to decipher the grammar of unfamiliar languages from around the globe. The Irish competitors will depart for Pittsburgh on Sunday, 24 July.

The International Linguistics Olympiad challenges secondary school students to develop their own strategies for solving problems in fascinating real languages. In past editions of the Olympiad these unfamiliar languages have included the Budukh language of Azerbaijan, the Incan language Quechua, and ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. In solving the problems, students learn about the diversity and consistency of language, and how to apply logic to problems of language understanding and translation.

Representing Team Ireland at this year’s Olympiad will be 18 year old Medbh Campbell of Methodist College Belfast, 17 year old Niamh Dhondt of Loreto Secondary School Kilkenny, 16 year old Declan Manning of Ballincollig Community School, and Alec Fair, also aged 16, of Methodist College Belfast. The four students were selected on the back of their strong performance at the All Ireland Linguistics Olympiad (AILO), which was hosted at Dublin City University in March 2011. More than 300 students from 42 schools across Ireland took the challenge this year.

AILO is run by the Centre for Next Generation Localisation (CNGL), a dynamic academia-industry research centre funded by Science Foundation Ireland and ten industry partners. Researchers at CNGL are producing advances in ‘localisation’, the process by which computers adapt and personalise software and digital content for different languages and cultures. By introducing students to linguistics and the application of logic to problems of language understanding and translation, AILO aims to inspire students to pursue careers in localisation and other export-focused activities. Current estimates put the value of the localisation sector in Ireland at over €680 million.

Speaking in advance of the team’s departure for Pittsburgh on Sunday, Medbh Campbell of Team Ireland said, “If it weren't for the Linguistics Olympiad, I might never have heard of linguistics - now that I have, learning about it has helped me so much, not only in studying a foreign language, but in understanding my own language's little quirks as well. I'm literally counting the days until the competition starts!”

Team mate Declan Manning is equally excited about the contest. "I'm really looking forward to the competition in Pittsburgh as I am sure it will be an extremely educational and enjoyable experience and a trip to remember”, said Manning. “The trip will definitely improve my knowledge of linguistics, as spending a week surrounded by the best young linguists in the world could only have this effect."

Team Leader Professor Harold Somers is anticipating a strong performance by the Irish competitors at next week’s International Olympiad. Somers said, “The logic and problem-solving skills displayed by the students are truly impressive. Their tremendous aptitude for applying these skills to decoding unfamiliar languages bodes well not just for the country’s performance at the International Linguistics Olympiad, but for the future of the highly valuable localisation and language services sectors in Ireland.”

The opening ceremony of the International Linguistics Olympiad 2011 will be held on Monday 25 July. The competition gets underway with the individual contest on Tuesday 26 July, followed by the team contest on Thursday 28 July. The winners will be announced on Friday 29 July. The teams can also look forward to a jam-packed agenda of fun linguistic and cultural activities throughout the week. Follow Team Ireland’s progress at www.cngl.ie/ailo

Download the press release (pdf - 256kb)

Exploiting Parse Structures for Native Language Identification

A guest presentation by Jojo Wong, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia

Date: 134 July 2011
Time: 4.00pm
Location: L2.21, School of Computing, DCU

Jojo Wong and Mark Dras

Attempts to profile authors according to their characteristics extracted from textual data, including native language, have drawn attention in recent years, via various machine learning approaches utilising mostly lexical features. Drawing on the idea of contrastive analysis, which postulates that syntactic errors in a text are to some extent influenced by the native language of an author, this paper explores the usefulness of syntactic features for native language identification. We take two types of parse substructure as features --- horizontal slices of trees, and the more general feature schemas from discriminative parse reranking --- and show that using this kind of syntactic feature results in an accuracy score in classification of seven native languages of around 80%, an error reduction of more than 30%.

Quality Estimation for Machine Translation

An Invited Presentation by Lucia Specia, Senior Lecturer at the Research Institute in Information and Language Processing, University of Wolverhampton

Date: 4 July 2011
Time: 2.30pm-3.30pm
Location: L2.21, School of Computing, DCU

Although significant progress has been observed in the overall quality of machine translation (MT) systems in recent years, it is well known that the quality of a given MT system can vary considerably across translation segments. The notion of quality and the level of "acceptability" of translations depend on the intended use of the translated segments, ranging from post-editing by fluent speakers of both source and target languages to gisting by speakers of the target language only. The need for models to assess the quality of translated segments in the various possible scenarios involving the use of automatic translations is becoming more and more evident and a number of efforts have been made recently in this direction.

The most obvious uses of such models include filtering out bad quality translations from a translation post-editing workflow (estimating translation post-editing effort) and informing readers who cannot understand the source text (estimating translation adequacy). In this talk I will present some of my recent work on modelling the problem of quality estimation for these and other applications. I will present the outcomes of a number of experiments with different language pairs and text genres/domains which demonstrate that it is possible to predict different aspects of quality using a relatively small number of training examples and standard supervised machine learning techniques.

Speaker's Biography
Lucia Specia (http://pers-www.wlv.ac.uk/~in1316/) is senior lecturer at the Research Institute in Information and Language Processing, University of Wolverhampton, UK. She is part of the Research Group in Computational Linguistics, headed by Prof. Ruslan Mitkov. Before coming to Wolverhampton, she worked as research engineer with the Cross-Language Technology Group, at the Xerox Research Centre Europe, France. She received a PhD from the University of São Paulo, Brazil, in 2007, where she was supervised by Prof. Maria das Graças Volpe Nunes and Dr. Mark Stevenson, from the Natural Language Processing Group, Sheffield University, UK. Lucia Specia is currently the principal investigator of a project on estimating the adequacy of Arabic-English machine translation, supported by DARPA, under GALE scheme, as part of the IBM team.

NCLT/CNGL Seminar Series

Time: Wednesday, 22 June 2011 at 4pm

Venue: L2.21, School of Computing, DCU

Speaker: Daqi Zheng, Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (Intern at CNGL EuroMatrix+)

Title: Dependency Forest for Statistical Machine Translation

Abstract:

We propose the Maximum Ranking Correlation (MRC) as an additional objective in discriminant tuning the parameters in the linear model of Statistical Machine Translation (SMT). We try to maximize the ranking correlation between the sentence level BLEU scores and the model scores of the N-best, while the MERT paradigm focuses on the potential 1-best candidates of the N-best list. After
we optimize the MER and the MRC objectives using an multiple objective optimization algorithm at the same time, we interpolate between them to get parameters which outperform both.

Experimental results on WMT French–English data set show that our method
significantly outperforms MERT on out-ofdomain data sets, and performs marginally better with MERT on in-domain data sets, which validates the usefulness of MRC on both domain specific and general domain data.

We hope to see you there!

NCLT/CNGL Seminar Series

Time: Wednesday, June 8th 2011 at 4pm

Venue: L2.21, School of Computing, DCU

Speaker: Zhaopeng Tu, Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (Intern at CNGL EuroMatrix+)

Title: Dependency Forest for Statistical Machine Translation

Abstract:

We propose a structure called dependency forest for statistical machine translation. A dependency forest compactly represents multiple dependency trees. We develop new algorithms for extracting string-to-dependency rules and training dependency language models. Our forest-based string-to-dependency system obtains significant improvements ranging from 1.36 to 1.46 BLEU points over the tree-based baseline on the NIST 2004/2005/2006 Chinese-English test sets.

We hope to see you there!

Ireland’s Centre for Next Generation Localisation and India’s Language Technologies Research Centre to collaborate on development of ground-breaking English-Indian translation systems

Researchers at two of the world’s major language technology research centres have committed their joint efforts to enhance the quality of translation from English to the major languages of India.

Pioneers at Ireland’s Centre for Next Generation Localisation (CNGL) and the Language Technologies Research Institute (LTRC) at the International Institute of Information Technology Hyderabad (IIIT Hyderabad) will collaborate to build accurate translation systems from English to Indian languages.

In addition to core funding from Science Foundation Ireland, the work will be supported by The Government of India through its India-Ireland Cooperative Science Programme and by CNGL academic partner Dublin City University through its DCU India Fund.

The outcomes of the two-year project are likely to have great social and commercial value. Accurate machine translation systems will reduce the cost and time associated with preparing (or ‘localising’) software and other digital content for international markets. The new systems will help Irish companies to communicate with India’s more than 1.2 billion consumers in their own language. They will also enable Indian companies to target not just Irish consumers in their native tongue, but the wider English-speaking world. With 72 per cent of consumers more likely to buy a product with information in their own language, there are substantial economic benefits associated with enabling companies to provide products and services to international customers in their native tongue.

The potential benefits of the research are not solely economic. Professor Andy Way, Principal Investigator at CNGL explains, “The social benefits of high-quality machine translation include wider access to digital content that was produced originally in another language. For example, speakers of Hindi with limited or no knowledge of English may be able to view accurate real-time translations of online content on topics that interest them – be it major sporting events, vital health information, or emergency response guidance.”

This new collaboration on English-Indian translation systems will continue the mutually-beneficial partnership on localisation R&D between Ireland and India – two significant players on the localisation world stage. The project will focus on syntax-driven approaches for statistical machine translation into Indian languages.

As Way explains, “The Centre for Next Generation Localisation’s new collaboration with IIIT Hyderabad will help us to essentially “unlock” digital content, products and services in Indian languages – some of which are among the most widely spoken in the world. For the people of India, we aim to make English-language content more easily accessible in their own language, thereby opening up a world of digital content, products and services that was previously beyond their reach.”

CNGL has on-going collaborative research projects with a range of industry and academic partners in India. These include IIIT Hyderabad and the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC) in Pune. CDAC Pune and CNGL have been collaborating on the creation of a community platform for The Rosetta Foundation for the past year. The Rosetta Foundation is an activity spun out of CNGL, which aims to relieve poverty, support healthcare, develop education and promote justice through access to information and knowledge across the languages of the world.

Download the press release (pdf - 402kb)

16th Annual LRC Conference: Vertical versus Virtual - 21st Century Localisation Strategies

&

3rd Multilingual Web Workshop

in assocation with CNGL

September 21-23
Carlton Castletroy Park Hotel, Limerick, Ireland

The Localisation Research Centre (LRC) and the Multilingual Web project are pleased to announce that the third workshop in the Multilingual Web series will be co-located with the 16th Annual Internationalisation and Localisation Conference organised by the LRC in association with CNGL.

This joint event will run from 21-23 September 2011 in Limerick, Ireland and aims to bring together the world’s leading experts in localisation, internationalisation and Multilingual Web design and conceptualisation for a series of presentations, talks and workshops. This will give attendees the opportunity to learn about the latest advances and developments in the field of localisation, as well as provide them with the opportunity to participate and have their say in workshops that will contribute towards the future of the Multilingual Web.

Registration is now open and further information can be found at www.localisation.ie and www.multilingualweb.eu or email LRC[AT]ul.ie

2nd XLIFF Symposium, 28 September 2011, Warsaw, Poland
Deadline for submission of proposals: 20 May 2011

The 2nd XLIFF Symposium is the main event of the pre-conference day of TM-Europe 2011. The symposium builds on the success of the 1st XLIFF Symposium which was held last September in Limerick, Ireland as part of the 15th Annual Internationalisation and Localisation Conference organised by the LRC/Centre for Next Generation Localisation.

Proposals are welcome on (but are not limited to) the following topics:

• The present state and future of XLIFF
• XLIFF - What is missing
• Analysis of XLIFF in commercial tools
• XLIFF and other standards
• XLIFF and the translation process
• XLIFF, terminology and translation memory
• XLIFF 2.0

In addition to this, proposals are welcome for short case studies and suggestions for future development. During the Symposium we are planning to have two sessions with three short presentations which introduce new ideas for XLIFF or examples of how XLIFF is being used in practise.

We will also be hosting a question and answer session with representatives of the XLIFF technical committee.

If you are interested in the above topics and have knowledge and experience to share with your peers, potential clients, suppliers, and other industry experts, please save the date and submit a proposal for presentations and panels for 2nd XLIFF Symposium.

The deadline for submitting proposals is 20 May 2011 and we shall be contacting potential speakers and panellists at the middle of June at the latest. Registration will open for TM-Europe 2011 and the 2nd XLIFF Symposium in June 2011.

The programme committee for the 2nd XLIFF Symposium conference includes:
Bryan Schnabel (XLIFF TC Chair, Tektronix)
Yves Savourel (ENLASO Corporation)
David Filip (Localisation Research Centre/Centre for Next Generation Localisation)
Dimitra Anastasiou (University of Bremen)
Lucía Morado Vázquez (Localisation Research Centre/Centre for Next Generation Localisation)
Jesús Torres del Rey (University of Salamanca)
Peter Reynolds (TM-Global)

Please submit proposals for presentations and panels for 2nd XLIFF Symposium using the standard form http://www.tm-europe.org/XLIFFSymposium

For more information on the conference please visit
www.tm-europe.org/xliff , and for information on the XLIFF technical committee visit http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=xliff

Mr Reinhard Schäler of Ireland’s Centre for Next Generation Localisation (CNGL) brings social and economic potential of localisation to a global stage

Mr Reinhard Schäler of the Centre for Next Generation Localisation (CNGL) pictured with Mr Thierry H. Amoussougbo of the UN's Economic Division for Africa, at the UN's CODIST-II conference in Addis Ababa on 4 May 2011, just before his presentation to the 1,000 delegates attending, on "Localisation as an Industrial Strategy"

In recognition of his work in spearheading attempts to bridge the global “digital divide”, one of Ireland’s leading researchers in software localisation has been invited to address the United Nations Economic and Social Council today. Mr Reinhard Schäler of the SFI-funded Centre for Next Generation Localisation (CNGL) at University of Limerick will speak at the Second Meeting of the Committee on Development Information, Science & Technology (CODIST-II) of the UN’s Economic Commission for Africa, which takes place from 2-5 May in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. At today’s plenary session on “Innovation strategies and industrial development plans”, Mr Schäler will address senior officials and experts from African member states on the theme “Localisation as an Industrial Strategy”.

CODIST-II is bringing together more than 1,000 member state delegates and other experts to explore the extent to which African countries have harnessed innovation to enhance industrial development on the continent. Delegates will review challenges pertaining to the ICT, Science, Innovation, Geo-Information, and Libraries and Information Services sectors, and will advise the UN’s Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) in these areas.

Explaining how localisation has the potential to contribute to the economic and social progress of developing countries, Mr Schäler says, “Localisation – the process of adapting digital products, services and content to the needs of global users – can play an important role in helping to bridge the global digital divide. Localisation enables companies to launch their products in markets for which their original product would not be suitable. For this reason, it is a value-adding multiplier of the software industry. However, the true potential of localisation goes beyond opening up business opportunities across the globe. Many communities on the planet find themselves on the wrong side of the so-called “digital divide”, with vital hygiene, health, food, educational and other information not available in their local languages. Localisation technologies and processes have the potential to make a considerable contribution to bridging this divide.”

Mr Schäler’s presence at the CODIST-II signifies the formal start of preparations for the Action Week for Global Information Sharing (AGIS’11) , which will be hosted by the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) in Addis Ababa in December 2011. In 2009, the first Action Week for Global Information Sharing was hosted at was hosted by the University of Limerick and The Rosetta Foundation, with support from the CNGL. The Rosetta Foundation is a CNGL/University of Limerick spin-off that provides free translation and localisation services for non-profit organisations, supported by innovative technology licensed by CNGL. The Rosetta Foundation and AGIS share the common goal of bringing together and training volunteer translators and localisation specialists with NGOs from all over the world in order to fight the problem of global information poverty. Among the many not-for-profits assisted by The Rosetta Foundation are Special Olympics and the World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts.

Speaking from the UN’s CODIST-II meeting in Addis Ababa, Mr Schäler expressed his delight at being invited to speak at such a high-profile event: “Being invited to address the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa at CODIST-II is an honour for me and it highlights the international standing of Centre for Next Generation Localisation and spin-off not-for-profit organisation, The Rosetta Foundation. My presence here reflects both Ireland’s leadership position in localisation and the economic and social impact of investment in fourth-level research in Ireland.”

Download the press release (pdf - 35kb)

CNGL academic partner, Dublin City University, this week co-hosts ECIR 2011: The 33rd European Conference in Information Retrieval. The conference, which runs from 18-21 April 2011, is organised by DCU in co-operation with the University of Sheffield, supported by BCS IRSG and ACM SIGIR. Researchers from the Centre for Next Generation Localisation (CNGL) are participating in the event, which is the main European forum for the presentation of new research results in the field of Information Retrieval.

Dr Gareth Jones of CNGL at DCU is Programme Co-Chair for ECIR 2011. Gareth was keynote session chair for opening session at the Radisson Blu Royal Hotel in Dublin city centre.

CNGL researchers presented three posters at the Poster and Demo session on Wednesday evening.

The first of two poster presentations by Walid Magdy (DCU) and Dr Gareth Jones (DCU) asks ‘Should MT Systems be Used as Black Boxes in CLIR?’

Walid Magdy and Dr Gareth Jones also presented a joint poster with Patrice Lopez of INRIA - Humboldt University, Germany on ‘Simple vs. Sophisticated Approaches for Patent Prior-Art Search’.

Dr Johannes Leveling of CNGL at DCU presented a joint poster with Giorgio Maria Di Nunzio of University of Padua, Italy and Thomas Mandl of University of Hildesheim, Germany. The topic of this poster is ‘Multilingual Log Analysis: LogCLEF’.

Johannes was in action again today, when he chaired the afternoon session on Question Answering / Natural Language Processing.

Johannes and Dong Zhou (TCD) served on the Programme Committee of ECIR.

Liadh Kelly (DCU) was Programme Co-Chair for the EPS 2011: Evaluating Personal Search Workshop, which took place on Monday at the Guinness Storehouse.

CNGL also presented work at the Workshop on Information Retrieval Over Query Sessions on Monday.

Debasis Ganguly (DCU) with Johannes and Gareth presented a paper on "Automatic Generation of Query Sessions using Text Segmentation".

Johannes and Gareth also gave a paper on the theme "Same Query - Different Results? A Study of Repeat Queries in Search Sessions".

Attendees at tomorrow’s closing session will get a sneak-peek at logo designs for the ACM SIGIR 2013 Conference, which will be hosted by the SFI-funded CNGL and CLARITY CSETs in July 2013. Don’t miss your chance to have your say!

For further information on ECIR 2011, please see the following sources:
ECIR2011 website: http://www.ecir2011.dcu.ie/
ECIR2011 conference programme: http://www.ecir2011.dcu.ie/program/
ECIR2011 venues: http://www.ecir2011.dcu.ie/attending/venue/

ECIR 2011 Conference Chairs Gareth Jones (CNGL, DCU), Cathal Gurrin (CLARITY, DCU), Paul Clough (university of Sheffield)

Keynote Speaker Kalervo Jaravlin (University of Tampere)

Title: Automatic Document Summarization & Some Thoughts

Time: Wednesday, April 27th 2011 at 4pm

Venue: L2.21, School of Computing, DCU

Speaker: Xiaofeng Wu, School of Computing, DCU

Abstract:
Automatic Document Summarization (ADS) is one of the subfields of Natural Language Processing (NLP). It can be defined as a technology which summarizes documents with the help of the computer, or to represent the original documents with short but comprehensive texts according to the demands of customers. The research of ADS is of both theoretical and applicational values.

In this talk Xiaofeng will first give an introduction of ADS and the research work he did in his Ph.D. In the introduction, the Abstractive or Extractive methods, the various Features and Machine Learning algorithms, how to Evaluate and how to deal with Redundancy will be briefly discussed.

Xiaofeng will then discuss a few thoughts on how and why he wants to use Integer Linear Programming (ILP) in Cross-Lingual Document Summarization, which has strong relationship with MT, and how he plans to combine sentence compression with sentence extraction under the ILP framework. He will also discuss the very difficult challenge of how to get the compression quality prediction.

Final Call for Papers issued as submission deadline approaches

Are you interested in submitting a paper for the First Workshop on Personalised Multilingual Hypertext Retrieval at the ACM Hypertext 2011 conference? Act now, as the submission deadline is Thursday, 14 April 2011.

Researchers from the Centre for Next Generation Localisation’s Digital Content Management track are organising the workshop, which will be held in Eindhoven on 6 June 2011. Dr. Séamus Lawless of Trinity College Dublin and Dr. Johannes Leveling of DCU School of Computing will be programme chairs at the workshop, while Dr. Alex O’Connor and Dr. Dong Zhou, both of Trinity College Dublin, are serving on the programme committee.

This workshop explores the use of multilingual hypertext retrieval technologies and adaptive personalisation techniques to enable end-users to conduct searches in their native language, but receive results collated from content collections in a variety of languages, all tailored for consumption by the end-user.

The PMHR workshop aims to promote the exchange of ideas between researchers working on hypertext and adaptive hypertexts, cross-lingual information retrieval, personalised search, personalisation for Web and hypertexts, and recommender systems. The workshop will have a specific focus on research in user modelling and multilingual personalisation for hypertext retrieval. In addition, submissions which focus on non-English data or research with a clear application in a multilingual scenario are welcome.

The workshop has four main goals:
• to bring together researchers from different areas to exchange ideas for both personalised and multilingual IR
• the identification of recent advances in, and major obstacles to research in this area
• to provide researchers with an overview of approaches, resources, and current and planned research activities in the area
• to stimulate discussion towards identifying cross-disciplinary solutions to some of the problems in the area

For details of topics and submission guidelines, visit the PHHR2011 website

Speaker: Jie Jiang, CNGL at DCU
Time: Wednesday, 6 April 2011 at 4pm
Venue: Room L2.21, DCU School of Computing, Dublin 9
Place: Room L2.21

Title: Source-side Syntactic Reordering Patterns with Functional Words for
Improved Phrase-based SMT

Abstract:
Inspired by previous source-side syntactic reordering methods for SMT, this talk focuses on using automatically learned syntactic reordering patterns with functional words which indicate structural reorderings between the source and target language. This approach takes advantage of phrase alignments and source-side parse trees for pattern extraction, and then filters out those patterns without functional words.

Word lattices transformed by the generated patterns are fed into PBSMT systems to incorporate potential reorderings from the inputs. Experiments are carried out on a medium-sized corpus for a Chinese®CEnglish SMT task.

The proposed method outperforms the baseline system by 1.38% relative on a
randomly selected testset and 10.45% relative on the NIST 2008 testset in terms of BLEU score. Furthermore, a system with just 61.88% of the patterns filtered by functional words obtains a comparable performance with the unfiltered one on the randomly selected testset, and achieves 1.74% relative improvements on the NIST 2008 testset.

Note that it is our previous work on source-side syntactic reordering, and we are looking forward to your feedback.

30 May—02 June 2011
University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland

Registration is now open for the 2011 LRC Internationalisation and Localisation Summer School, in association with the Centre for Next Generation Localisation (CNGL). This year the summer school will focus on the exciting area of computer and video game localisation.

This Summer School will provide a unique opportunity for anyone interested in the lo­calisation of computer and video games to learn from experts in the field and see how the different elements of the localisation process are carried out at some of the most innovative and forward thinking companies in the business.

Over the four days of this intensive Summer School, workshops and talks will be given by speakers from Corncrow Games AB, Big Fish Games, Enzyme Testing Labs, Guerilla Translations, Language Automation, Inc., Microsoft, Mi'pu'mi Games, OnLegends & Key­words International

If you are interested in games and localisation and want to take your first steps into this area then this event is for you.

Limited Availability

Attendance at the Summer School is strictly limited to 35 people on a first-come-first-served basis, so register now to avoid disappointment.

Registration for all four days of the event will cost €100. This includes the talks, work­shops and teas/coffees.

For more information and to register, visit: www.localisation.ie or email LRC[AT]ul.ie

The Centre for Next Generation Localisation (CNGL) is delighted to present the new edition of CNGLNews, its quarterly round-up of CNGL news, events and activities. The newsletter features research updates, conference reviews and researcher profiles. Check it out today!

View the current edition of CNGLNews (pdf - 1.06MB)

CNGL helps to guide implementation of Europe 2020 strategy for smart, sustainable and inclusive growth

The Centre for Next Generation Localisation (CNGL) is this week participating in the 4th University-Business Forum, a pan-European event designed to generate proposals for the next generation of European Commission programmes on education and culture. Mr. Steve Gotz, Commercialisation Development Manager at CNGL, is representing the Centre at this important forum, which takes place on 22-23 March in Brussels, Belgium.

Europe 2020, Europe's strategy for smart, sustainable and inclusive growth, sets the direction to go for the next ten years. The 4th University-Business Forum will help to demonstrate the value and potential of University-Business Cooperation towards the implementation of the Europe 2020 strategy.

Europe 2020 is guided by seven flagship initiatives that are intended to facilitate progress towards the implementation of the strategy. The cooperation between higher education and the world of work has a key role to play and contributes to several of the flagship initiatives, in particular to three of them: Youth on the Move; Innovation Union; and Agenda for new Skills and Jobs. University-Business Cooperation is also a major factor for regional development, as underlined in the “Smart Specialisation Agenda for Regions”.

CNGL’s participation in the 4th University-Business Forum reflects the Centre’s important role in fostering productive academia-industry cooperation. The discussions and debates will lead to concrete proposals for the next generation of EU programmes and provide valuable input to the up-coming Communication on the Modernisation of Higher Education.

http://forum.teamwork.fr

The Information and Communication Technology (ICT) sector is one of the most important export-oriented economic sectors in Ireland, with great opportunities for economic development and contributing to the recovery. Innovations made in Ireland, based on research, are creating these opportunities.

The Annual All-Ireland ICT Dissertation Award of the Royal Irish Academy aims to make more visible the significant scientific contribution made by Ireland, in particular by post-graduate students, to Information and Communication Technology. This award also aims at initiating knowledge transfer from the Universities and Institutes of Technology into society and the economy.

As some of the largest research efforts in ICT in Ireland, this thesis award is organised and sponsored by the Science Foundation Ireland funded Centres for Science, Engineering and Technology (CSETs) in the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) sector (DERI, CLARITY, CTVR, CNGL, and LERO) under the auspices of the Royal Irish Academy.

The award is combined with a cash prize of 1500 EURO, sponsored by the CSETs.

The President of the Royal Irish Academy, Professor Luke Drury, said :"This award reflects the importance of ICT research as an integral part of the academic landscape in Ireland. Digital tools and electronic communications are now indispensable in all areas of research as well as more generally in civic society and commerce. Excellence in this area in our Universities and Institutes of Technology is a necessary prerequisite for economic growth and prosperity."

The Director of ICT Research in Science Foundation Ireland, Prof. Fionn Murtagh, said: "Our ever-changing ICT industry will play a pivotal role in Ireland's economic recovery. With a large number of ICT multinational companies based in Ireland collaborating with ICT-focused research bodies, it is crucially important that we continue to position Ireland at the leading edge of technological innovation. Science Foundation Ireland has been instrumental in facilitating this, and is committed to continuing such a role in partnership with a diverse range of agency, commercial and academic partners."

Chairperson of the evaluation committee and Director of DERI, NUI Galway, Professor Stefan Decker said: “ICT has a critical economic role in Ireland. Thanks to the foresight of Science Foundation Ireland Irish ICT research is internationally competitive, with many areas in a world-leading position. This award is showing the ingenuity of Irish based ICT research to the public ”.

The closing date for submissions is Saturday, 7 May, 2011. The winner will be announced in June, 2011.

For more details about the award please go to: http://ria.ie/our-work/grants---awards/national-prizes-awards.aspx

About the sponsors
The SFI Centres for Science Engineering and Technology in ICT
SFI Centres for Science, Engineering & Technology (CSETs) help link scientists and engineers in partnerships across academia and industry to address crucial research questions, foster the development of new and existing Irish-based technology companies, attract industry that could make an important contribution to Ireland and its economy, and expand educational and career opportunities in Ireland in science and engineering.

CSETs exhibit outstanding research quality, intellectual breadth, active collaboration, flexibility in responding to new research opportunities, and integration of research and education in the fields that SFI supports.
Below are links to the currently funded SFI ICT CSETs.

DERI: Digital Enterprise Research Institute
CTVR: Centre for Telecommunications Value-Chain-Driven Research
LERO: Irish Software Engineering Research Centre
CNGL: Centre for Next Generation Localisation
CLARITY: Centre for Sensor Web Technologies

The Royal Irish Academy
The Royal Irish Academy, the academy for the sciences and humanities for the island of Ireland will vigorously promote excellence in scholarship, recognise achievements in learning, direct research programmes and undertake its own research projects, particularly in areas relating to Ireland and its heritage.
It will reflect upon, advise on and contribute to public debate and public policy formation on issues of major interest in science, technology and culture.
It will continue to offer an independent forum to Irish scholars, it will provide a network of support for scholarly disciplines through its network of national committees and commissions, it will maintain and enhance its unique library, it will publish scholarly papers and it will represent the world of Irish learning internationally.

Boston office and expansion in Beijing added to the Welocalize platform

Welocalize, Inc., the on-demand translation leader, has announced the merger with Avantix Global. With its headquarters near Boston, Avantix Global is a specialised provider of translation services and translation technology. This merger adds great people, a Boston office and expansion in Beijing to the Welocalise platform.

“I am excited about the future of the industry and our merger with Avantix makes our future even brighter. Their experience and innovations will bolster our vision for our company and the industry,” said Welocalize CEO, Smith Yewell. “Welocalize is building an innovative, on-demand translation platform, and we are working with more and more of the best people in the industry.”

Read the full story

A researcher at the Centre for Next Generation Localisation has been awarded a prestigious internship with Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington, USA. Sandipan Dandapat, a PhD scholar under the supervision of Prof Andy Way and Dr Sara Morrissey at Dublin City University, will join Microsoft for a period of three months, commencing in June 2011.

Sandipan is currently working on EBMT based approaches of MT to overcome the difficulties of state-of-the-art PBSMT approach. He has also worked on morphological analyzer and generator, part-of-speech taggers (for Bengali and Hindi), Multiword Expressions (MWEs). His areas of interest include Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence and Computational Linguistics.

Speaking of his expectations of the internship, Sandipan said “I am very much excited to work with MSR Redmond and expecting to have a good exposure to industry-based research. I will try to contribute at my level best for a fruitful completion of my internship.”

Microsoft is an industry partner of the Centre for Next Generation Localisation (CNGL). CNGL researchers work closely with staff at Microsoft’s European Product Development Centre in Dublin to produce novel localisation technologies that are industry relevant and market driven.

Young scholars prepare to test their problem-solving and linguistic skills at national finals of schools language challenge

Some of the best lateral thinkers from secondary schools across Ireland are sharpening up their logic, language and problem-solving skills in preparation for the national final of the All Ireland Linguistics Olympiad (AILO), which takes place on Wednesday, 9 March 2011 at Dublin City University. The international contest sees young scholars test their minds against the world’s toughest puzzles in language, logic and linguistics.

From a starting line-up of more than 300 students representing schools in 23 counties, the country’s top 100 problem-solvers will pit their wits against each other at the national finals of the competition. The prize: the title of All Ireland Linguistics Olympiad Champions 2011 and the opportunity to represent Ireland at the International Linguistics Olympiad World Finals in the USA in July 2011.

The All Ireland Linguistics Olympiad challenges students to develop their own strategies for solving problems in fascinating real languages from around the globe. No prior knowledge of linguistics or languages is required: even the hardest problems require only logical ability, patient work, and a willingness to think around corners.

The AILO competition aims to introduce students to linguistics (i.e. the study of human language) and to the application of logic to problems of language understanding and translation. Finalists are tutored by experts from the Centre for Next Generation Localisation (CNGL).

Read more about the All Ireland Linguistics Olympiad (AILO).

CNGL helps chart course for globalisation standards development for the new decade

The Centre for Next Generation Localisation (CNGL) is this week participating in the LISA Open Standards Summit, which takes place from 28 February to 1 March 2011 in Boston, Massachusetts, USA.

The Open Standards Summit brings together industry leaders from all of the major localisation-related organisations (LISA, ATA, GALA, TDA, CNGL, ISO TC37, and others), along with leading members of the client, language service provider, and language tools developer community in the common goal of defining a common industry platform for standards development.

Day 2 of the summit will see Dr Páraic Sheridan, Scientific and Operations Director at CNGL, address the theme ‘Framework, Resources and Funding.’ Páraic’s session poses the questions, “If we agree on specific issues and targeted processes, what should the framework for working together look like? From where do the resources and money needed to develop them come? What institutional structures are needed to support their development?”

Dr David Lewis of CNGL at Trinity College Dublin and Dr David Filip of CNGL at University of Limerick, will also participate in the summit.

New CNGL industry partner, Welocalize, features strongly on the summit programme. Welocalise CEO, Smith Yewell, will deliver a keynote address on ‘The Dark Side of Standards - Why the Lack of Standards significantly undermines Both Business Prosperity and Social Progress around the World’.

Derek Coffey, VP of Technology & Professional Services at Welocalize, will set out the existing standards-related activities and the future priorities of the Globalization Tools Developers constituency group of which his organisation is a strong stakeholder.

The globalisation industry is in urgent need of standards that matter, standards that go beyond “asset protection” to embrace a new perspective of ensuring that users can work with any tool, anywhere, at any time without manual intervention and fixes in order to achieve their goals. Rather than being tied to the offerings of a particular vendor or being hampered by the inability of tools to work with each other, the new standards landscape will promote the free flow of data from the moment of content creation through to its publication and beyond.

The two-day program will chart a course for globalisation standards development in the coming years, with a focus on concrete actions that can be taken to resolve the urgent and growing problems that face the localisation industry. CNGL's participation in the summit is evidence, yet again, of the Centre's international repect and standing within the localisation sector.

For further details, see the LISA Open Standards Summit website.

March’s CNGL 101 seminar is being held on Wednesday, 2 March 2011 from 2pm to 6pm at Trinity College Dublin. The event will be based in the Maxwell Theatre, Hamilton building (beside the O’Reilly building).

The agenda for the 101 is, as follows:

2pm: Intellectual Property made simple (Stephen Roantree)

3pm: Commercialisation made simple (Steve Gotz)

4pm: Tea & Coffee break (ORI Foyer)

4.30pm: Introduction to META-NET (John Judge, DCU)

4.45pm: META-NET Group discussions (breakout groups)

5.20pm: Group reporting & open floor discussions

6pm: End

All PhD students and postdoctoral researchers are expected to attend 101s. All members of CNGL are, of course, welcome!

Globalisation Services Multinational announces collaboration with Irish-based academia-industry research partnership

Ireland’s status as world leader in software localisation was reinforced today, as translation supply-chain management multinational, Welocalize, Inc., announced that it is to join the country’s Centre for Next Generation Localisation (CNGL) as industry partner. The partnership will see the two organisations collaborate to address key challenges in localisation – a significant value-adding, multiplier component of the global software and content distribution industry.

Language barriers constitute a formidable obstacle to the free flow of information, products and services in an increasingly globalised economy and information society. To overcome these barriers, the Centre for Next Generation Localisation (CNGL) brings together academic researchers and industry experts to conduct ground-breaking research into next-generation localisation. This process involves the adaptation of digital content to culture, location and linguistic environment. CNGL’s more than 100 researchers at Dublin City University, Trinity College Dublin, University College Dublin and University of Limerick are helping to enable people interact with digital content, products and services in their own language, according to their own culture, and according to their own personal needs.

As a Science Foundation Ireland-funded Centre, CNGL helps link scientists and engineers in partnerships across academia and industry to address crucial research questions, foster the development of new and existing Irish-based technology companies, attract industry that could make an important contribution to Ireland and its economy, and expand educational and career opportunities in Ireland in science and engineering. In addition to funding of €16.7m from Science Foundation Ireland, CNGL has already attracted an industry partner contribution of €13.5m.

With today’s investment, Welocalize becomes CNGL’s tenth full industry partner. Welocalize supports open-standards and developed GlobalSight, a collaborative, open-source initiative to develop a flexible and sustainable Translation Management System (TMS) that leverages and addresses the shared needs of the industry.

CNGL has established collaborative research links with Irish SMEs and large multinational companies, some of whom are world leaders in their respective fields. Partnerships with Symantec, IBM, Microsoft, Traslán, SpeechStorm, Alchemy, VistaTEC, Dai Nippon Printing and SDL are already helping to move CNGL innovations out of the academic laboratory and into the marketplace, thereby helping to create high-tech, high-quality employment opportunities for the future. The impact of research in localisation is particularly significant in an export-led economy such as Ireland, as localisation enables companies to introduce products to otherwise inaccessible markets.

Speaking at the announcement at Dublin City University, Josef van Genabith, Director of CNGL, said “We strongly believe that our partnership with Welocalize will enable us to continue producing break-through technologies that help companies to adapt their products and services to the needs of global users. CNGL’s strong commercialisation model has already resulted in a strong flow of invention disclosures, patent applications and licensing agreements. We are confident that our collaboration with Welocalize will prove equally fruitful for both parties.”

“Collaboration between Welocalize and the CNGL has already generated significant research outcomes and we are thrilled to offer our technology platform and support to the university,” says Smith Yewell, CEO and Founder of Welocalize. “We firmly believe that formalizing our productive relationship with the CNGL will accelerate industry advancements in order to revolutionize the industry.”

Welcoming Welocalize to the partnership, Tony O’Dowd, President of Alchemy Software Development and Chair of the Centre’s Industry Advisory Board, said: “In the three years since it began, CNGL has quickly established itself as a major resource to the localisation industry, one that has helped visibly maintain Ireland’s reputation for innovation and leadership in localisation. We are now seeing significant emerging opportunities for new high-potential start-up companies to bring technologies to market and create jobs.”

Commenting on the significance of the announcement, John Travers, Director-General of Science Foundation Ireland, said: "Central to the transformation in Ireland's research landscape over the last decade has been the creation of clustered research centres of excellence incorporating an increasingly direct involvement of industry into the academic environment. It is a model that has been purposefully implemented, and we are now witnessing unprecedented multi-disciplinary engagement. Welocalize coming on board as an industry partner is an endorsement of CNGL's achievements to date and a clear indication that it is progressing towards delivering on its substantial commercial potential."

Since its establishment in 2007, the CNGL has adopted a strong commercialisation model that has resulted in numerous invention disclosures, licensing agreements and patent applications. In addition to on-going collaboration with its industry partners, the Centre has engaged with more than 70 companies across Ireland over the last year under the Enterprise Ireland Commercial Development Manager programme.

RiverSuite, a CNGL spinout opportunity, is transforming on-going CNGL research into a commercial offering that enables Fortune 500 companies to reduce costs and increase consumer satisfaction by providing superior customer care experiences. The spinout leverages cutting-edge CNGL technologies which fuse proprietary corporate databases and complementary corporate assets, with distributed data stores to deliver real-time, personalised solutions. This spinout is expected to launch in autumn 2011.

The social impact of investment in third level research is evident in the Centre also. The Rosetta Foundation, an activity spun out of CNGL, is working to relieve poverty, support healthcare, develop education and promote justice through access to information and knowledge across the languages of the world. The Rosetta Foundation supports the not-for-profit activities of the localisation and translation communities through the development and deployment of an intelligent translation and locasliation platform.

“I am thrilled about the tremendous impact and value of the CNGL partnership and the progress we will make together towards interoperability and connectivity innovations,”, commented Derek Coffey, VP of Technology & Professional Services of Welocalize.”We have many shared goals with the CNGL, and collaborating with the research groups within the CNGL will enable us to engage future localisation professionals for industry wide improvements through technological advancements.”

Press Release: Welocalize joins Centre for Next Generation Localisation as Industry Partner (pdf - 394kb)

Secondary School scholars test their problem-solving and linguistic skills with novel language challenge

More than 300 students from 23 counties across Ireland are putting their logic, language and problem-solving skills to the test as the All Ireland Linguistics Olympiad (AILO) gets underway this week. The international contest sees young scholars test their minds against the world’s toughest puzzles in language, logic and linguistics.

43 secondary schools across the country will host qualifying rounds this week, with the top performing students progressing to the National Finals at Dublin City University on 9 March 2011. There, students will battle it out for the national title and the opportunity to represent Ireland at the International Linguistics Olympiad World Finals in the USA in July 2011.

The All Ireland Linguistics Olympiad challenges students to develop their own strategies for solving problems in fascinating real languages from around the globe. Students must use their ingenuity to solve puzzles such as deciphering ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics; interpreting Tenji, the Japanese equivalent of Braille; and writing the names of football teams in Chinese. No prior knowledge of linguistics or languages is required: even the hardest problems require only logical ability, patient work, and a willingness to think around corners.

The AILO competition aims to introduce students to linguistics (i.e. the study of human language) and to the application of logic to problems of language understanding and translation. Finalists will be tutored by experts from the Centre for Next Generation Localisation (CNGL), a major multi-disciplinary academia-industry research centre funded by Science Foundation Ireland and based at Dublin City University, Trinity College Dublin, University College Dublin and University of Limerick. Researchers at CNGL are producing advances in how computers adapt and personalise software and digital content, including computer games, to different languages and cultures.

“In today’s increasingly global business world, it is ever more important for our young people to have language and problem-solving skills and cultural awareness”, says Professor Harold Somers, co-ordinator of the AILO competition. “There are a whole range of career opportunities that draw on skills at the intersection of computing and languages. Ireland has for many years been a global leader in ‘localisation’, the process by which multinational companies adapt their products and product-related content to foreign markets and languages, and we’re now witnessing huge growth in jobs related to global customer support operations that draw on language and problem-solving skills.”

“I particularly enjoyed deciphering the Chinese and Japanese puzzles. It created a challenge to understand the characters but this was also incredibly rewarding to feel that I could understand these different complex languages”, says Clodagh Herron Rice, Fifth Year student at St Joseph’s Secondary School, Navan. “I really feel that these activities assist me in how I approach learning languages. They help create a newfound understanding of how languages work.”

"I believe studying languages is an exciting and interesting task, studying how they are formed is really challenging. I am considering studying a degree in languages and linguistics in the University of Limerick", says Conor Costelloe, Fifth Year student at Coláiste Chiarain in Croom, Co. Limerick.

By generating interest in the study of human language, AILO is helping to ensure that there is an adequate supply of talented graduates to continue the success of localisation and other export-focused activities in Ireland and to cement the country’s leadership position in this growing segment.

Do you think you have a knack for languages, logic and lateral thinking? Do you think you could decipher an ancient script, or deduce the logical patterns of Swahili or Aymara? Visit the AILO website to test your own linguistics skills with some sample problems at www.cngl.ie/ailo

Press Release: Battle of Minds at All Ireland Linguistics Olympiad (pdf - 240kb)

New Machine Translation Post-editing Guidelines focus on Setting Clear Expectations

Translation industry think-tank the Translation Automation Users Society (TAUS) and Ireland’s world-leading Centre for Next Generation Localisation (CNGL) have published a set of guidelines that will serve as guidance for customers and service providers in the translation industry who are exploring the new territory of machine translation post-editing.

Post-editing is the correction of machine-generated translation output to ensure it meets a level of quality negotiated in advance between client and post-editor.
The increased use of machine translation by clients and language service providers has generated a more substantial need for post-editors; however, language specialists have been reluctant to offer this sought-after service due to an absence of clear guidelines and acceptance criteria.

These new guidelines are aimed at helping customers and service providers set clear expectations and can be used as a basis on which to instruct post-editors. It is expected that organisations will tailor these baseline guidelines for their own purposes.

The guidelines suggest that the degree of effort warranted in post-editing should be determined by two main criteria: the quality of the raw MT output and the expected end quality of the content.

Guidelines for achieving “good enough quality”

“Good enough” is defined as comprehensible (i.e. the main content of the message be understood), accurate (i.e. it communicates the same meaning as the source text), but as not being stylistically compelling. The text may sound like it was generated by a computer, syntax might be somewhat unusual, grammar may not be perfect but the message is accurate.

• Aim for semantically correct translation.
• Ensure that no information has been accidentally added or omitted.
• Edit any offensive, inappropriate or culturally unacceptable content.
• Use as much of the raw MT output as possible.
• Basic rules regarding spelling apply.
• No need to implement corrections that are of a stylistic nature only.
• No need to restructure sentences solely to improve the natural flow of the text.

Guidelines for achieving quality similar or equal to human translation

This level of quality is generally defined as being comprehensible (i.e. an end user perfectly understands the content of the message), accurate (i.e. it communicates the same meaning as the source text) and stylistically fine, although the style may not be as good as that achieved by a native-speaker human translator. Syntax is normal, and grammar and punctuation are correct.

• Aim for grammatically, syntactically and semantically correct translation.
• Ensure that key terminology is correctly translated and that untranslated terms belong to the client’s list of “Do Not Translate” terms”.
• Ensure that no information has been accidentally added or omitted.
• Edit any offensive, inappropriate or culturally unacceptable content.
• Use as much of the raw MT output as possible.
• Basic rules regarding spelling, punctuation and hyphenation apply.
• Ensure that formatting is correct.

“The demand for localisation of goods and services is growing at a pace that is difficult to meet with human translation alone”, explains Sharon O’Brien of CNGL. “The number of localisation service providers who currently offer machine translation post-editing services is still relatively small. These guidelines are intended to facilitate the wider and more effective use of post-editing”.

The TAUS/CNGL guidelines also offer some general recommendations to minimise the post-editing effort. Among these recommendations are ensuring that source text is well written and, if possible, tuned for translation; integrating terminology management across source text authoring, MT and TM systems; training post-editors in advance; examining raw MT output quality before negotiating throughput and price and setting reasonable expectations; agreeing a definition for the final quality of the information to be post-edited; and paying post-editors to give structured feedback on common MT errors so the system can be improved over time.

“These MT post-editing guidelines have been produced following consultation with TAUS members, governmental institutions and translator organisations”, says Rahzeb Choudhury of TAUS. “Their publication highlights how collaboration between academic and industry stakeholders can result in direct benefits for organisations and for the localisation industry generally.”

Download the TAUS/CNGL Machine Translation Post-editing Guidelines.

More than 400 Transition Year students from 26 schools across Dublin are sampling university life and experiencing the high-tech world of computing this month, as they attend the CNGL-supported ComputeTY programme at DCU’s School of Computing.

The enthusiastic students are undertaking the weeklong web design and development course, at which they learn how to create their own webpages. The course runs from 10 January to 4 February 2011.

Some students are also sampling computer programming, learning how to instruct a virtual robot to carry out simple tasks such as moving and transporting objects. Using a training programme called RobotWorld, this programming course mirrors some of the first year content of the university’s popular BA in Computer Applications degree.

Since its launch in 2005, ComputeTY has been completed by almost 3,000 Transition Year students from Dublin schools. The course enables students to develop practical computing skills and to gain certification from DCU for their work.

With industry experts expressing concern that too few students are currently opting for computing at Third Level, the ComputeTY course aims to show students first-hand how interesting information technology can be and thereby encourages them to consider IT as an attractive career option.

Run by DCU School of Computing, the course is supported by the Centre for Next Generation Localisation (CNGL), a world leading research centre, where researchers are producing advances in how computers can adapt software and digital content, including computer games, to different languages and cultures. Localisation is just one possible direction for a career in computing.

Despite the recession, employment opportunities for computing graduates remain strong. Figures release by DCU recently revealed that all graduates of its popular BA in Computer Applications degree secured employment or were pursuing postgraduate studies within six months of graduating.

If you would like to participate in next year’s ComputeTY programme, contact Christine Stears at DCU School of Computing at Tel: (01) 7005237 or Email: Christine.stears (AT) dcu.ie.

Centre for Next Generation Localisation (CNGL) researcher, Walid Magdy, was the proud recipient last week of an Invention Disclosure Award. At a ceremony hosted by Dublin City University (DCU) on 10 December 2010, Invent DCU presented the award to Walid in public recognition of his work with Invent to protect and commercialise his research.
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Walid is a Ph.D. candidate under the supervision of Dr. Gareth Jones at Dublin City University. His work focuses on achieving higher retrieval effectiveness for recall-oriented IR tasks in general search and in patent search in particular.

Walid’s award reflects the Centre for Next Generation Localisation’s strong commercialisation model: since its establishment in 2007, the Centre has generated a strong flow of invention disclosures, patent applications and industry-academia collaborations.

The next 101 Day for CNGL members will take place in Trinity College Dublin from 14.30-18.00 on
Tuesday 14th December 2010.

At the Scientific Committee Meeting we discussed running a 101 session where each Demo Team will present a video of their demo as not all team members had a chance to get around to the other stands.

Demos 101
Location: Room LTEE2, Panoz Institute (http://www.tcd.ie/Maps/assets/pdf/tcd-main-campus.pdf)
Time: 14.30-18.00, Tuesday 14th December

There's an area reserved in the Lombard near TCD from 6pm for a Christmas get together afterwards. CNGLers, please come along after the 101!

Christmas get together
Location: The Lombard http://www.thesmithgroup.ie/thelombard/location.html
Time: 18.00, Tuesday 14th December

The SFI CSET Thesis in Three Competition took place on Wednesday night (17th Nov) in the Sugar Club, Dublin 2.

19 PhD students from 6 SFI funded CSETs gave elevator pitches for their PhD in the SFI CSET Thesis in Three competition last Wednesday night, which ran as part of Innovation Dublin. Each presenter had three minutes and just three slides!

CNGL Researchers Asanka Wasala, Amalia Zahra and Rajat Gupta gave great presentations on behalf of CNGL and did us proud!

The first overall prize went to Fiona Young from CRANN for her presentation “Carbon nanotube fibres-A new spin on nature’s web”.

The event was sponsored by the participating CSETS: CLARITY, CNGL, CRANN, SBI, Lero and BDI as well as UCD, UCD Campus Bookshop, and Snap Printing Donnybrook.

The judging panel consisted of: Stephen Flinter from SFI, Michael McAleer from the Irish Times and Ben Hurley from the NDRC. The event was expertly MC’d by Virginia Perry-Smith from Disney Research. Many thanks for Dr. Bridget Kelly and Daragh Byrne (CLARITY) for all their work organsing the event.

CNGL industrial partner Microsoft Ireland EDC welcomes CNGL members, industrial
partners and the general public to their premises in Leopardstown, to CNGL’s third
Localisation Innovation Showcase on Wednesday 10th November 2010.

Attendees have the opportunity to explore an exhibition of leading research from CNGL researchers as well as industrial partners Microsoft, Symantec, VistaTEC and Alchemy Software Development. A keynote address presenting a “sweeping view of machine translation and related technologies developed at Microsoft” will be delivered by Mr. Chris Wendt, Principal Group Program Manager for Machine Translation in Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington.

The showcase, which promotes CNGL’s innovative research in the field of localisation, features an overview of CNGL’s commercialisation activities and collaboration opportunities, and celebrates the success of researchers whose work has begun to generate income, for example through software licenses or invention disclosures.

All welcome. Full details at: http://www.cngl.ie/localisationinnovationshowcase.html
RSVP: emccann (AT) computing.dcu.ie

Press Release: CNGL Third Localisation Innovation Showcase
Press Release: CNGL Translating from Academia to Industry

The CNGL Thesis in Three Competition took place on Wednesday in the Ginger Man on Fenian Street, Dublin 2. Fourteen CNGL PhD students presented their theses in three minutes each. It was a really fun competition with some great every day examples used in the presentations.

Grainne Maycock (VistaTEC) presenting Walid Magdy with 1st prize

The Winner was Walid Magdy for this presentation "Improving Patent Search". Second place went to Asanka Wasala for "Addressing the Problem of Interoperability in Localisation Process Management". Rajat Gupta got third place for his presentation "Collaborative Localisation Platform: “Crowdsourcing”". Well done to all the presenters and especially to our top three.

A big thanks to our judges:
Edward McDonnell (Commercialisation Manager, CLARITY research centre)
Gráinne Maycock (Chief Sales Officer, VistaTEC Ltd.)
Kirti Vashee (Asia Online)

The top three presentations will go on to present CNGL at a Thesis-in-Three Final in the Sugar Club on Wednesday 17th November where researchers from CSET groups around Ireland will present their doctoral work.

The CNGL Thesis in Three Competition will take place next Wednesday 13th October at 6.30pm in the Ginger Man on Fenian Street, Dublin 2 (Map).

CNGL Phd students will be pitching their PhD in 3 minutes, with just 3 slides to a general audience. The presentations won't be technical and everyone is invited to come along to hear the presentations. There will be some finger food and chat afterwards too! There are prizes for 1st, 2nd and 3rd!

The judges on the night will be:

Edward McDonnell (Commercialisation Manager, CLARITY research centre)
Gráinne Maycock (Chief Sales Officer, VistaTEC Ltd.)
Kirti Vashee (Asia Online)

Please find the flyer here.

The top three presentations will go on to present CNGL at a Thesis-in-Three Final in the Sugar Club on Wednesday 17th November where researchers from CSET groups around Ireland will present their doctoral work.

The Deputy Director of the Centre for Next Generation Localisation (CNGL), Prof. Vincent Wade (TCD), and CNGL PhD student, Neil Peirce (TCD), have been awarded the European Language Label for their project Language Trap: An Adaptive Language Learning Video Game.

L-R: Prof. Tom Collins (Dean of Teaching and Learning NUI Maynooth), Neil Peirce (CNGL PhD student TCD) and Prof. Vincent Wade (CNGL Deputy Director TCD)

To celebrate the European Day of Languages, eleven Irish projects were awarded the European Language Label for innovative ways of teaching and learning languages by Professor Tom Collins, Dean of Teaching and Learning at NUI Maynooth, at an awards’ ceremony in NUI Maynooth today.

The Language Trap game is a key component of the CNGL Education and Outreach Programme. The game is an interactive language learning game to aid students preparing for the Leaving Certificate German Oral Examinations. The game presents an innovative approach to language learning using sythesised speech dialogues combined with a state of the art learning personalisation system. Over 80 students have used and evaluated the game this year.

Read the full CNGL Press Release here.

Read the Léargas Press Release here.

The third Localisation Innovation Showcase will take place on Wednesday 10th November 2010 in Microsoft Ireland, South County Dublin Business Park, Leopardstown, Dublin from 08.30 – 16.00.
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The Localisation Innovation Showcase will feature an overview of CNGL work, keynote address and exhibition of cutting cutting-edge research from CNGL researchers and industrial partners.

This Localisation Innovation Showcase brings together demonstrators of CNGL’s research, based around three localisation scenarios (BLW – Bulk Localisation Workflows, PMCC – Personalised Multilingual Customer Care, PMSN – Personalised Multilingual Social Networking) and an exhibition of the advances in in-house localisation technology from our Industrial Partners.

RSVP: Eithne McCann, emccann (AT) computing.dcu.ie or (01) 700 6700.

Note (added 2010-11-02): see also http://www.cngl.ie/localisationinnovationshowcase.html

Dr. Alexandru Ceausu gave a seminar on Thursday 12th August 2010 on Improving factored machine translation for highly inflected languages using rich morpho-syntactical annotation. Dr. Alexandru Ceausu is visiting from the Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence Romanian Academy, Bucharest

META-NET, a network of excellence forging the Multilingual Europe Technology Alliance is pleased to announce that we will be hosting a networking session entitled “Language Technology for a Multilingual Europe” at ICT 2010 on September 28th next at the Brussels Expo in Brussels, Belgium.
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META-NET’s work in creating a Strategic Research Agenda for Language Technology is closely aligned with the focal areas of content processing, information access/mining and interaction from the ICT workprogramme.

The networking session will be in keeping with these aims and we will present some initial findings from each of our Vision Groups, whose work is helping drive the preparation of the Strategic Research Agenda. The presentation of findings will be used to kick-start discussions between the panel and the audience on visions for the future of Language Technologies in ICT and related topics of relevance to research and academia.

Full details, including the agenda with a list of speakers at the networking session are attached. You can also find further information here:

http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/events/cf/ict2010/item-display.cfm?id=3323

http://www.meta-net.eu/events/ict-networking-session-2010/

http://www.linkedin.com/groupItem?view=&gid=3052556&type=member&item=26036539&goback=.gmp_3052556

http://www.facebook.com/?ref=home#!/event.php?eid=101588979899585

CNGL are running a Centre for Talented Youth (CTYI) course "Japanese Language, Webpage Localisation and Machine Translation" for primary school students in UL this week. The course, run by Dr. Dimitra Anastasiou, Naoto Nishio and Enda Quigley focuses on teaching the Japanese language and also language technologies available today on the Internet. Students are learning to recognise letters in Katakana, listen to the sound of them and type them. Then they will try out Google Machine Translation system with source language English and target language Japanese. Students will also create their own webpage both in English and Japanese. Educational games such as the Primary School Toolkit, Nintendo characters and drawings will make students aware not only of language but also of cultural differences.

The new website of the PLuTO project (Patent Language Translation Online) has just gone live at http://pluto-patenttranslation.eu/.
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PLuTO is a 3 year FP7 commercialisation project coordinated here at the CNGL aimed at providing an online solution for multi-lingual retrieval and translation of patents. Keep this site it your bookmarks as we expect some very exciting developments over the coming months!

CNGL and CLARITY, the SFI funded CSETs are exhibiting at Science in the City as part of the Euroscience Open Forum 2010 (ESOF 2010). Both centres were selected from many different research centres across Europe to exhibit at this prestigious outreach event. The Euroscience Open Forum 2010, taking place in Turin from the 2-7 July, is one of the most important events for showcasing scientific research.
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Left to right: Conor Lenihan, TD, Minister for Science, Technology, Innovation and Natural Resources, Leo Enright and Cara Greene CNGL Education and Outreach Manager

CNGL are showcasing language technology innovation and localisation business integration through a number of demos- the World Cup Twanslator Twitter application, a sign language translation tool, interactive dialogues, an adaptive education game and a primary school localisation toolkit.

CLARITY are presenting Wobbleball, a sensor driven game used in rehabilitation, and Learndancing, a learning game where a dancemat is used in conjunction with a maths or spelling game. Examples of interactive garments containing sensors which detect subtle changes in the wearer are being shown as well as research prototypes for other sports applications.

CNGL is hosting nine undergraduate interns this summer. The internships range from Mobile Next Generation Localisation applications to development of a corpus.

Education and Outreach has funded four of the internships:

• Mobile Next Generation Localisation Applications Based at TCD.
  Supervisor: Dr. David Lewis (TCD)
• Investigating the usability and user experience of language technology applications Based at TCD.
  Supervisor: Dr. Nikiforos Karamanis (TCD)
• The Personalised Presentation of Movies Based in TCD.
  Supervisor: Dr. Séamus Lawless (TCD) with the support of Dr. Alexander O'Connor, Dr. Ian O'Keefe and Prof. Vincent Wade (TCD)
• Development of a tool to extract and merge data from a localisation data container Based at UL.
  Supervisor: Lucía Morado Vázquez (University of Limerick) with the support of Mr. Reinhard Schäler.

  A further five internships have been funded by the research tracks:

• Implementing a language modelling approach to information retrieval for structured document search Based at DCU.
  Supervisor: Dr. Gareth Jones (DCU)
• Development of a small hand-annotated corpus Based at TCD.
  Supervisor: Hector Franco (TCD), Gerard Lynch (TCD) and Liliana Mamani (TCD) with the support of Dr. Carl Vogel (TCD)
• Developing an XLIFF-based author memory system Based at University of Limerick.
  Supervisor: Lorcan Ryan (UL)
• Instrumentation of a Personalised Web Platform Based at TCD.
  Supervisor: Dr. Séamus Lawless (TCD) and Dr. Ian O'Keefe (TCD)
• Web-Based Digital Content Management Applications Based at TCD.
  Supervisor: Dr. Séamus Lawless (TCD)

Welcome to all our new interns!

CNGL recently published our 2009 annual report. You can read it here.

CNGL has also published three CNGL videos on YouTube:

The Centre for Next Generation Localisation

CNGL – Introduction to Localisation

CNGL – Localisation in Ireland

CNGL wish to recruit a Web Interaction Designer on a two-year fixed term contract basis with primary responsibility for designing and implementing user-centric interface components for an adaptive, collaborative, multilingual social networking environment in collaboration with the relevant Research Leaders.
Job ad: Web Interaction Designer - TCD - Closing date 22nd June 2010

CNGL wish to recruit a Web Systems Engineer on a two-year fixed term contract basis with primary responsibility for designing and implementing the functional components (middleware) for an adaptive, collaborative, multilingual social networking environment in collaboration with the relevant research leaders.
Job ad: Web Systems Engineer - TCD - Closing date 22nd June 2010

We had our third 101 in TCD on Friday 14th May. Dr. Gavin Doherty gave a talk on User Studies & Interaction Design. Dr. Tony Veale presented on a Distributed Approach to User-Generated Ontologies and Dr. Dimitra Anastasiou gave a 101 on Metadata. Thanks to Hilary for her help with organising the 101 in TCD.

This was followed by a fun table quiz in the Pav. Thanks to Shay for booking the Pav. Thanks to Ríona and Alex for all their help with the questions and with marking. The winners were the "ILTers" who was made up of Sara Morrissey, Ankit Srivastava, Sergio Penkale and Ozlem Cetinoglu. "Too much Pressure" kicked up a bit of a fuss but judges decisions were final ;-)

Dr. Johann Roturier (Symantec) is giving an introduction to Python for non-programmers on Friday 7th May in DCU. The second half of the course will take place on 21st May 2010.

The Centre for Next Generation Localisation (CNGL) will hold its Spring 2010 Public Showcase at the Localisation Research Centre (LRC), CSIS Department, University of Limerick on Tuesday 27th April.

This event will showcase cutting edge research carried out at CNGL in the field of localisation, as well as an overview of our Commercialisation and Education & Outreach activities. There will be an opportunity to interact with CNGL’s researchers at the afternoon poster session, and to engage with live displays of the Demonstrator Systems being developed at CNGL.

We are delighted to welcome keynote speaker Mr. Francis Tsang, Senior Director of Globalisation at Adobe, to share his thoughts on next generation technology and organisation needs for enterprise localisation. We are also pleased to be joined by keynote speaker Mr. Greg Oxton, Executive Director of Consortium for Service Innovation, to discuss the dramatic impact the internet has had on customer support interactions, and the challenges and opportunities now faced by vendors.

More information and the timetable: CNGL Public Showcase Tuesday 27th April 2010.

All interested parties are invited to attend. Please contact Ms. Eithne McCann (emccann (AT) computing.dcu.ie) by Friday 23rd April to register.

Mount Temple Comprehensive School on the Malahide Road, Dublin have retained the AILO individual trophy and won the team trophy in AILO 2010. Congratulations Mount Temple!
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Just under 100 secondary school students from all over the Republic and Northern Ireland qualified for the CNGL All Ireland Linguistics Olympiad (AILO) final in DCU on Wednesday 24th March 2010.

Over 270 students from 20 schools took the first round in their own school in February 2010. Students who got a sufficient mark qualified for the final in DCU. CNGL allocated a tutor from the research centre to each school to help them learn how to tackle the linguistics problems.

Mount Temple, Team competition winners. Emma Carrigan, who also won the individual competition, is on the far left

Emma Carrigan from Mount Temple Comprehensive School, Dublin got first place in the individual round. Congrulations Emma on becoming the AILO All Ireland Individual Champion. Ellen Cameron from Antrim Grammar School got second place. Imogen Grumley Traynor from St Kilian's Deutsche Schule, Dublin got third place with fourth place going to Cormac Ó Mainnín from Ballincollig Community School, Cork. Emma, Ellen, Imogen and Cormac will be invited to respresent Ireland at the International Linguistics Olympiad (ILO) in Sweden 18-23 July 2010. Well done!

The 'TMT' team from Mount Temple won the Team competition and therefore become AILO All Ireland Team Champions. Well done Mount Temple for "doing the double". 23 teams took part in the team competition in the afternoon of 24th March. While the competition produced a clear winner, the next three teams could not be separated in second place: 'MCB1' and 'MCB3' from Methodist College Belfast and 'Linguinis' from Newtown College, Waterford.

We will be presenting the trophies to Mount Temple in their school soon. Well done to all the students who took part and see you next year!

The Kerryman did a piece on the students from Gaelcholáiste Chiarraí, Tralee, competing in the All Ireland Linguistics Olympiad. You can read it here.

Prof. Andy Way in the Irish Times

John Cradden from the Irish Times interviewed Prof. Andy Way for a piece entitled "Word getting out about translation", The piece is in the Friday 19th March edition of the Irish Times.

Read the Irish Times Article

CNGL's MT goup have done really well in the ACL Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation (WMT) shared translation task this year.
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This year's translation task involved 8-pairs of European languages (English to French/German/Spanish/Czech and vice versa). DCU took part in the English to Spanish and English to Czech translation tasks.

The team comprised Sergio, Rejwanul, Sandipan, Pratyush, Ankit, Mikel Forcada, Pavel Pecina , Antonio Toral , Jinhua and the coordinator, Sudip Naskar.
In English-Spanish, DCU submitted 5 systems' outputs, and they are ranked 1st, 2nd, 4th, 5th and 6th. In English-Czech, they submitted only 1 system output, and got overall 7th position.

ILT 1.9 are focussing on providing translation support for patients with limited English when they go to book an appointment at the GP's surgery. They are targeting Deaf users of Irish Sign Language (ISL) and also Bangla speakers.
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To this end they have developed a corpus based on patient-receptionist dialogues, and have recently finished filming an ISL user signing the corpus phrases. The corpus is also being translated into Bangla. They will then transcribe the ISL corpus using HamNoSys, a transcription system for sign languages. The corpus will be used in a corpus-based MT system with an avatar simulating the ISL output.

They want to use SiGML to represent the HamNoSys transcription: SiGML provides an interface between the transcription and the animation program that drives the avatar. A particular area of research interest is the incorporation of NMFs (Non-Manual features are used in sign language to convey intonation and emotion amongst other things) of ISL in the Avatar animation.

ILT1.9 recently visited the "virtual humans" team at UEA Norwich, where SiGML was developed. Reuse of their research results for their project will make an interesting collaboration.

The UEA team have completed an impressive number of projects involving avatars to assist Deaf people communicate. They are currently involved in two EU projects: Dictasign and to Signspeak.

The Centre for Next Generation Localisation and The National Centre for Language Technology hosted the Machine Translation Marathon (MTM) 2010 at Dublin City University 25-30th January on behalf of the EuroMatrixPlus Consortium, a Machine Translation research project.
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It was the fourth in a series of MT Marathons in which researchers, developers, students, and users of machine translation from all over the world attend lectures and labs introducing them to the latest research in the field.

Over 100 people from more than 20 countries attended the event, representing industrial, academic and governmental organisations.

The morning sessions were made up of experts giving introductory lectures on a variety of MT topics followed by presentations of open-source tools from researchers in the field.

In the afternoon, students got an opportunity to work on lab exercises, while more experienced researchers worked together on open-source projects.

CNGL researchers exhibited at the BT Young Scientist Exhibition on Thursday 14th January 2010 from 09.30-12.30.
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Neil Peirce demo'd his interactive language learning game, Declan Dagger and Dominic Jones demo'd their TweetTranslate translation service which plugs into Twitter allowing users, with the click of button, to translate their tweet streams into multiple languages. Sara Morrissey demo'd her sign language translation tool.

Thanks very much to Neil, Declan, Dominic, and Sara for getting involved in Young Scientist.

Shane Gilchrist joined the ILT 1.9 group on an intern contract for the month of January.
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He was employed to create Irish Sign Language video from an English corpus of GP secretary-patient dialogue. This will form the first part of our bilingual corpus for MT. He also took part in the transcription of the ISL videos into an annotated format suitable for translation and then animation. He acted as a representative of the Deaf community and a consultant for CNGL He was aided in his video translation by Alvean Jones, who verified the translations for accuracy. Shane is currently finishing a Masters at the University of Amsterdam on General Linguistics.

The Executive Office of the President and National Economic Council issued its “Strategy for American Innovation.” Among the recommendations was a call for “automatic, highly accurate and real-time translation between the major languages of the world — greatly lowering the barriers to international commerce and collaboration.”

In conjunction with Innovation Dublin, CNGL hosted a 'Localisation Innovation Showcase' event at DCU on Friday October 16th.
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The CNGL showcase highlighted localisation business and technology innovation through exhibitions and demonstrations of products, technologies and projects across both industrial and academic partners of the SFI-funded CNGL centre.

AGIS '09 - Promoting Equality through Language and Cultural Diversity - took place in the University of Limerick (UL), Ireland 21 - 23 September 2009.
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The Action week for Global Information Sharing brought together hundreds of volunteer translators, localisation specialists and NGOs from all over the world to address the plague of global information poverty.

The Rosetta Foundation was launched at AGIs '09. The Rosetta Foundation is a not-for-profit organisation (charity) registered in Ireland. It is a spin-off from the University of Limerick's Localisation Research Centre and CNGL. The Rosetta Foundation supports the not-for-profit activities of the localisation and translation communities through the development and deployment of an intelligent translation and localisation platform.

The 14th Internationalisation and Localisation Conference organised by the the LRC, took place on 24-25 September 2009 at the Clarion Hotel, in Limerick City, Ireland. The theme of this year's conference was Localisation in The Cloud and the conference looked at the application of cloud based computing and software as a service concepts to the software localisation industry.

Ruadhan Treacy, from Newtown School, Waterford won a Honourable Mention award in the individual round of the 7th International Olympiad in Linguistics 27-31 July 2009) in Wroclaw, Poland. Congratulations to Ruadhan and all the Irish team for doing us proud!!

23 teams from 17 countries competed in the individual and team competitions. Bulgaria and Poland got gold medals in the indiviual round and USA Red Team won the team competition.

The Irish team was made up of two members of the winning team from Newtown School, Waterford, and two of the top students in the AILO individual competition. The team was accompanied by team leader Hugh Dobbs, a teacher from Newtown School, and CNGL's Education and Outreach team.

As a part of the CNGL Undergraduate Students as Researchers Programme, Enda Quigley, an undergraduate student, joined CNGL researchers during the summer in the University of Limerick for 8 weeks. Enda worked on a primary school localisation toolkit. The toolkit is designed to fit the NCCA guidelines on intercultural education.

The All Ireland Linguistics Olympiad took place in Dublin on Monday April 27th 2009. Over 90 secondary school students competed in the individual and team competitions in the Venue in the Hub in DCU.
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The Individual competition was won by Dylan Coburn Gray, Mount Temple School, Dublin and the Team competition was Newtown School, Waterford.

The International Linguistics Olympiad will take place 26-31 July in Wrocław, Poland. The team from Newtown School, Waterford and their teacher have been invited to represent Ireland in Poland. As the winning individual, Dylan Coburn Gray has been invited to accompany the team to Poland to represent Ireland also. All will take part in the individual competition in Poland.

Full results can be found on the AILO website.

The 12th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL-09) took place in Athens 30 March - 3 April 2009. It was organised by the National Centre for Scientific Research (NCSR) "Demokritos" - Institute of Informatics & Telecommunications. It covered a broad spectrum of disciplines working towards enabling intelligent systems to interact with humans using natural language, and towards enhancing human-human communication through services such as speech recognition, automatic translation, information retrieval, text summarisation, and information extraction. Members of CNGL attended the event.

CNGL will run the first ever CNGL All Ireland Linguistics Olympiad in the school year 2008/9. Secondary school students in transition year and 5th year from the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland are invited to competete.

Many disciplines such as science, maths, creative writing, music, run competitions to find the most promising young students. Some take the form of projects or experiments, others involve composition or performance. A LINGUISTICS OLYMPIAD involves face-to-face competition where teams or individuals have to use their ingenuity, creativity and skill to solve language-related problems.

The Olympiad itself involves both individual and team competitions solving a series of logic and linguistics problems. No specialist linguistics knowledge is assumed, nor does knowledge of specific foreign languages help particularly. The individual contests involve solving four or five problems over a period of 2½ hours. The team competition, where four students work together, has more/harder problems.

The Centre for Next Generation Localisation (CNGL) supported Localization Industry Standards Association (LISA) Forum Europe 2008 (LISA) which took place in Dublin in the Radisson SAS Royal Hotel, Golden Lane, from December 08 - 11 2008.

The LISA Forum Europe concentrated on the business impact in the globalisation industry of operating without standards.

CNGL had a exhibition stand at the LISA conference. A number of CNGL industrial and academic members attended and presented at the event.

The Centre for Next Generation Localisation (CNGL) was a bronze sponsor of the 17th ACM International Conference of the Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2008) which took in Napa Valley, California October 26-30, 2008.

The ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM) brings together leading researchers and developers from the database, information retrieval, and knowledge management communities.

On 20-22 of October Alexander Troussov (IBM) participated in the International Multiconference on Computer Science and Information Technology, Wisla, Poland. He presented the the paper "A Linguistic Light Approach to Multilingualism in Lexical Layers for Ontologies". This paper got Computer Linguistics - Applications Best Demonstration Award 2nd place.

Traslán's Senior Software Developer, Dr. Declan Groves, gave a keynote speech at the Eighth Conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas (AMTA 2008) 21-25 October 2008. Read more on Translán News and Events.

CLARITY, CNGL, CTVR, DERI and Lero will present an award for the best doctoral dissertation of 2008 in a software related discipline.

The award will be given to the thesis that has made the most significant contribution to its field - whether computer science, software engineering or software related area. The winner will receive a prize of €2,500.

CNGL are holding an internal competition to pick a PhD thesis to represent CNGL in the joint ICT-CSET competition. All CNGL postdoctoral researchers, who have submitted their thesis in 2008, are eligible. The PhD thesis does not have to have been completed at a CNGL university but it must be written in English.

Each thesis must be accompanied by a short supporting letter, describing the importance of the research, from the postdoctoral researcher's CNGL supervisor.

Sara Morrissey, a CNGL PostDoctoral researcher, was a runner-up in The Localisation Research Centre (LRC) Best Localisation Thesis Award. The competition was open to students who had completed a thesis on a relevant theme within the past two years and was judged by a panel of academic and industry experts. Sara's Phd thesis was entitiled "Data-Driven Machine Translation for Sign Languages". Sara is working in CNGL on Assistive Technology for People with Limited English in the Patient-Doctor Scenario.

Coling 2008 took place is Manchester from 18-22 August. CNGL is supporting Coling as a bronze sponsor. CNGL had a boothe at the conference promoting the centre's research and vacancies. A number of CNGL and NCLT members attended the conference. Yuqing Guo and Ventsislav Zhechev presented papers at Coling.

The Localisation Research Centre, in conjunction with CNGL, are running the 7th LRC Internationalisation and Localisation Summer School in the University of Limerick, Ireland from 29 July to 01 August 2008

Registration is now closed for the LRC summer school.

The CNGL Education and Outreach Programme ran an "Arabic Language and Culture" and "Web Design" course in conjunction with the Centre for Talented Youth (CTY) this week. Ms. Teresa Nevin, who has taught English in the Middle East for some time, prepared the culture side of this course. She worked with Dr. Lamia Tounsi (Arabic Language), Dr. Sylwia Ozdowska (Web Design) to deliver the course this week. Forty students (aged 7-14) took part in this course in the School of Computing, DCU.

CNGL members are participating in a free IBM training workshop on the latest LanguageWare Resource Workbench on July 2-3 2008. IBM have added a lot of new functionality to the core LanguageWare API to support information extraction and shallow parsing and the workbench serves as a data development and testing environment to support and compliment the core technology. Participants will be given the latest version of the software and will leave with a fully configured development environment.

If there is sufficient interest IBM are willing to run more workshops to meet the demand.

The CNGL Education and Outreach Programme hosted a teacher, Ms. Teresa Nevin, in DCU.

Teresa researched and taught the arabic culture side of the "Arabic Language and Culture" course that CNGL are running with the Centre for Talented Youth. Teresa has lived in the middle east for some time. She worked with researchers from CNGL / NCLT who are teaching the arabic language and web design elements.

The first CNGL Scientific Committee took place in the Gallery in the Helix on Thursday 29th May 2008. The Scientific Committee coordinates, provides guidance on and monitors performance of all research activities of the Centre, and identifies new research directions. The Scientific Committee Meeting includes all members of the CNGL. In this first meeting, each research track leader presented what the aims of their research are to all CNGL members.

The Research and Innovation Ireland 2020 supplement in the Irish independent interviewed the CNGL Director, Prof. Josef van Genabith in April 2008. You can see the article, courtesy of WhiteSpace Publishing here.

The Minister for Enterprise and Employment, Michael Martin, announced the award of €16.8m by SFI to create the Centre for Next Generation Localisation (CNGL) in December 2007. Industry partners are contributing €13.6m in materials, research services and additional funding.

School of Computing and 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.

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.

Prof. 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."