News Archive
CNGL will hold its Spring 2010 Scientific Committe Meeting at the Localisation Research Centre (LRC), CSIS Department, University of Limerick on Wednesday 28-Thursday 29th April.
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CNGL PhD students and postdoctoral researchers will present on their latest research. There will also be collaborative sessions, working group meeting and discussion sessions.
International collaborators Prof. Mike McTear (University of Ulster - Speech), Dr. Alistair Edwards (University of York - Speech & Mobile HCI), Prof. Bernd Möbius (Universisät Stuttgart - Phonetics, Speech Synthesis) and Prof. James Hogan (University of Queensland- Internationalism) are attending.
Prof. Lauri Karttunen (PARC, University of Stanford), Prof. Fred Jelinek (John Hopkins University), Prof. Peter Brusilovsky (University of Pittsburgh) and Mr. Andrew Bredenkamp (acrolinx GmbH) from our Scientific Advisory Board are also attending the meeting to review our work.
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.
The Centre for Next Generation’s (CNGL) Machine Translation group, led by Prof. Andy Way at Dublin City University (DCU), announces the release of ‘OpenMaTrEx’, a free/open-source example-based machine translation (EBMT) system based on the marker hypothesis.
The OpenMaTrEx EBMT system release comprises a marker-driven chunker (based on Green’s “marker hypothesis”), a collection of chunk aligners, and two engines: one based on the simple proof-of-concept monotone recombinator (released last January as 'Marclator') and a Moses-based decoder. OpenMaTrEx is a free/open-source version of the basic components of MaTrEx, the data-driven machine translation system designed by the Machine Translation group at the School of Computing of Dublin City University.
This free/open-source release results from collaboration with Prof. Mikel L. Forcada of Universitat d’Alacant in Spain who is currently a visiting researcher within the CNGL MT group at DCU through an ETS Walton Award from Science Foundation Ireland (SFI).
Through SFI funding of the Centre for Next Generation Localisation and additional funding from EU FP7 research projects currently coming on stream, DCU now boasts one of the largest academic research groups focused on MT worldwide. The OpenMaTrEx release is an important step in a strategy of participation in the free/open-source community in parallel with a programme of commercial engagement with companies interested in adopting, tuning and deploying machine translation technology.
Over the past number of years, Prof Andy Way has led the MT group at DCU in pursuing corpus-based approaches to MT, which have culminated in the MaTrEx system, a modular, maintainable and efficient data-driven machine translation system which combines example-based machine translation (EBMT) and statistical machine translation (SMT) and which consistently ranks as one of the top-performing MT systems in open machine translation evaluations (e.g. WMT-09, WMT-10 IWSLT-09, etc.).
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.
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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!
Over 250 second level students all over Ireland took the first round paper of the CNGL All Ireland Linguistics Olympiad (AILO) in their own schools on Wednesday February 3rd 2010. 70 students have qualified for the final in DCU on March 24th 2010.
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A CNGL tutor has been allocated to each school. CNGL has allocated a tutor to each school to offer guidance on how to tackle the linguistic and logic problems students will face in the final. More information can be found on the CNGL AILO Website.
The Kerryman did a piece on the students from Gaelcholáiste Chiarraí, Tralee, competing in the All Ireland Linguistics Olympiad. You can read it here.
A number of members of CNGL, CNGL-affiliated projects and the NCLT attended the Language Technology Days on 22-23 March in Luxembourg. These included Prof. Josef van Genabith (CNGL Director), Prof. Andy Way (ILT Principal Investigator), Ms. Riona Finn (CNGL Centre Administrator), Dr. John Judge (META-NET CIO), and Dr. Lamia Tounsi (NCLT). Invited speaker Prof. Andy Way presented the successful PSP project 'PLuTO': Patent Language Translations Online. CNGL are coordinating this project, and supplying information retrieval and machine translation expertise to the consortium. Prof. Way's talk was very well received.
Prof. Andy Way, Mr. Roberto Cencioni, Prof. Josef van Genabith
CNGL was also very much to the fore in two presentations by Prof. Hans Uszkoreit (DFKI) on 'META-NET', the Multilingual Europe Technology Alliance Network of Excellence of which CNGL is a founding member. CNGL was also mentioned strongly in presentations on three STREPs: by Dr. Philipp Koehn (Edinburgh) on 'EuroMatrix+', by Dr. Christof Monz (Amsterdam) on 'Cosyne', and by Dr. Nuria Bel (UPF, Barcelona) on 'Panacea'.
Dr. Lamia Tounsi (NCLT) travelled with financial support from Enterprise Ireland to present her project proposal "European Southern Partner Language" to EU project officers. She received good feedback, and found many potential contacts for possible collaborations. Finally, a META-NET project meeting was held in Luxembourg on Wed 24th March.
In sum, this was excellent publicity for CNGL and affiliated centres, and CNGL continues to be very well placed for further FP7 calls to be issued later in 2010.
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
The second CNGL 101 Day is being held at University College Dublin (UCD) on Wednesday 10th March 2010.
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The topics covered will be Speech Technology by Prof. Julie Berndsen, Cross-lingual IR by Dr. Gareth Jones and Workflow by Dr. Lamine Aouad. We will also have an interactive session on the new CNGL Web Portal.
The first session was held at DCU and given by the area chairs. It focused on core aspects of ILT, LOC, DCM and SF. The format is 1 hour overview (accessible, basic principles) followed by 30 minutes discussion each.
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.
A CNGL researcher, Dr. Seamus Lawless, has secured funding along with humanities researchers from TCD and The University of Aberdeen for almost £334,000 under the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC - British Arts Council) Digital Equipment and Digital Enhancement for Impact scheme, to help devise new techniques to analyse a rare manuscript collection of the 1641 Depositions held by Trinity College Dublin.
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This project will build on an earlier £1 million project involving collaboration between Dr. Lawless and Prof. Vinny Wade in Trinity College Dublin and the universities of Aberdeen and Cambridge which led to the recent digitisation of the archive http://www.tcd.ie/history/1641.
The 1641 Depositions are witness testimonies, mainly by Protestants but also by some Catholics, describing their experience of the 1641 Rebellion - one of the most violent chapters of Irish history.
This AHRC funding will allow the researchers to interrogate the database for a variety of information including the development of the English language in Ireland and the settlers' lifestyle there in the 1640s, the language of atrocity appearing in the witness testimony and the reliability of the evidence in the depositions.
Researchers will work closely with IBM in Dublin, one of the world's leading technology companies, and use its LanguageWare© technology to analyse the depositions and to cross-correlate an array of features of the text - a process which would be too complicated and potentially take a lifetime for a scholar to undertake manually.
Dr Barbara Fennell, Senior Lecturer in Language and Linguistics at the University of Aberdeen, who will lead the project, said: "This body of material is unparalleled anywhere in early modern Europe, and provides a unique source of information on the 1641 rebellion.
The year-long project will bring together linguists, historians, digital humanities experts, geographers and computer scientists to create a new interactive research environment.
Dr. Lawless will work with the Department of History at Trinity College Dublin, researchers from the University of Aberdeen, the Digital Humanities Observatory, Dublin and the IBM LanguageWare© Group, Dublin to gather and evaluate their findings.
Coverage in the press today:
BBC News - 1641 massacre accounts examined
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/northern_ireland/8545972.stm
The Washington Post - Experts explore 1641 Irish slayings of Protestants
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/02/AR201003...
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’s (CNGL) Machine Translation group, led by Prof. Andy Way at Dublin City University (DCU), announces the release of ‘Marclator’ (Marker-based Translator), a free/open-source system for Example Based Machine Translation (EBMT). This release coincides with the 4th MT Marathon, a week-long event being hosted January 25th-30th by the CNGL and the National Centre for Language Technology (NCLT) at DCU in conjunction with the EuroMatrix+ project, where over 100 participants from 20 countries will have a chance to test and program open-source MT tools and systems.
The Marclator EBMT system release includes a fully functional marker-based chunker/tagger (based on Green’s “marker hypothesis”) with markers for some languages and a chunk aligner, as well as a proof-of-concept ‘naïve’ (monotone) recombination module or ‘decoder’.
This free/open-source release results from collaboration with Prof. Mikel L. Forcada of Universitat d’Alacant in Spain who is currently a visiting researcher within the CNGL MT group at DCU through an ETS Walton Award from Science Foundation Ireland (SFI).
Through SFI funding of the Centre for Next Generation Localisation and additional funding from EU FP7 research projects currently coming on stream, DCU now boasts one of the largest academic research groups focused on MT worldwide. The Marclator release is seen as a ‘first-step’ in a strategy of participation in the free/open-source community in parallel with a programme of commercial engagement with companies interested in adopting, tuning and deploying machine translation technology.
Over the past number of years, Prof Andy Way has led the MT group at DCU in pursuing corpus-based approaches to MT, which have culminated in the MaTrEx system, a modular, maintainable and efficient data-driven machine translation system which combines example-based machine translation (EBMT) and statistical machine translation (SMT) and which consistently ranks as one of the top-performing MT systems in open machine translation evaluations (e.g. WMT-09, IWSLT-09, etc.).
As a follow-on to the Marclator release, Prof. Way and Prof. Forcada will continue to collaborate toward a free/open-source release of a baseline MaTrEx system, combining Marclator with the Moses SMT decoder. This OpenMaTrEx release is anticipated for Spring 2010.
Resources:
http://www.cngl.ie
http://nclt.dcu.ie/mt
http://www.computing.dcu.ie/~mforcada/fosmt.html
http://www.computing.dcu.ie/~mforcada/marclator.html
http://www.euromatrixplus.net/
http://www.mtmarathon2010.info/web/Welcome.html
For more information please contact: info (AT) cngl.ie
he Centre for Next Generation’s (CNGL) Machine Translation group, led by Prof. Andy Way at Dublin City University (DCU), announces the release of ‘Marclator’ (Marker-based Translator), a free/open-source system for Example Based Machine Translation (EBMT). This release coincides with the 4th MT Marathon, a week-long event being hosted January 25th-30th by the CNGL and the National Centre for Language Technology (NCLT) at DCU in conjunction with the EuroMatrix+ project, where over 100 participants from 20 countries will have a chance to test and program open-source MT tools and systems.
The Marclator EBMT system release includes a fully functional marker-based chunker/tagger (based on Green’s “marker hypothesis”) with markers for some languages and a chunk aligner, as well as a proof-of-concept ‘naïve’ (monotone) recombination module or ‘decoder’.
This free/open-source release results from collaboration with Prof. Mikel L. Forcada of Universitat d’Alacant in Spain who is currently a visiting researcher within the CNGL MT group at DCU through an ETS Walton Award from Science Foundation Ireland (SFI).
Through SFI funding of the Centre for Next Generation Localisation and additional funding from EU FP7 research projects currently coming on stream, DCU now boasts one of the largest academic research groups focused on MT worldwide. The Marclator release is seen as a ‘first-step’ in a strategy of participation in the free/open-source community in parallel with a programme of commercial engagement with companies interested in adopting, tuning and deploying machine translation technology.
Over the past number of years, Prof Andy Way has led the MT group at DCU in pursuing corpus-based approaches to MT, which have culminated in the MaTrEx system, a modular, maintainable and efficient data-driven machine translation system which combines example-based machine translation (EBMT) and statistical machine translation (SMT) and which consistently ranks as one of the top-performing MT systems in open machine translation evaluations (e.g. WMT-09, IWSLT-09, etc.).
As a follow-on to the Marclator release, Prof. Way and Prof. Forcada will continue to collaborate toward a free/open-source release of a baseline MaTrEx system, combining Marclator with the Moses SMT decoder. This OpenMaTrEx release is anticipated for Spring 2010.
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.
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An article in the Irish Times argues that the continued investment by the Irish government via the Science Foundation Ireland supports the Irish economy in the long term by creating new jobs, generating new investment and attracting new industry. In particular, CSETs such as CNGL with their academy-industry partnerships are validating the potential Ireland is developing as a research economy and also the role of research in anchoring the significantly greater investments by these companies in associated manufacturing facilities.
Read the full article at http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/finance/2010/0111/1224262051456.html
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.
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There was an invited talk from Sadao Kurohashi entitled "Fully Syntactic Example-based Machine Translation". Prof. Mikel Forcada and Prof. Andy Way organised the event. A report on the workshop can be found here.
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.
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.
The CNGL Autumn 2009 meeting took place in DCU on 14-16 October 2009. There were 30 demos and posters on display from CNGL PhD students and Postdoctoral researchers. Dion Wiggins from AsiaOnline gave the keynote address.
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.
The joint conference of the 47th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 4th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing of the Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (ACL-IJCNLP 2009) took place in Suntec City Singapore from the 2nd August to the 7th August.
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It was organised by Chinese and Oriental Languages Information Processing Society (COLIPS) and A* STAR Institute for Infocomm Research. As a Gold Sponsor, CNGL was invited to exhibit during the three days of the main ACL-09 conference. Several members and collaborators of CNGL attended the conference, and presented posters and papers at the ACL-09 conference, and at the collocated event EMNLP-2009 (Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing).
Member of CNGL's external advisory board, Prof. Frederick Jelinek of Johns Hopkins University was presented with the lifetime achievement award. Our congratulation to Prof. Jelinek.
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.
From July 13-17 2009, CNGL ran two combined modules with CTYI; 'Japanese Language' and 'Culturally Localising Web Pages'.
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A group of forty students, aged 8-13 years old, took the two modules. Joss Moorkens, a CNGL PhD student based in DCU, taught the language module. Dr. Dimitra Anastasiou, a CNGL postdoctoral researcher at the University of Limerick (UL), and Naoto Nishio, a CNGL PhD student at UL, taught the culturally localising web pages. The Culturally Localising Web Pages course is designed to introduce the concept of localisation to the participants by comparing fun Japanese, English and French web sites. This course highlights the differences and similarities of contents among those languages and cultures to explain the importance of localisation. This students learnt the Katakana character set in Japanese and were able to type them when they created their own website.
A CNGL PhD student, Robert Smith, ran a "Computers and Animation" course with the Centre for Talented Youth (CTYI) in DCU. Forty children, aged 8-13 years old, attended the course last week in DCU (July 6th-July 10th).
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.
Mikel L. Forcada, a visiting professor on sabbatical leave from Universitat d'Alacant, Spain, will be based at CNGL, DCU from now until June 2010. Mikel is working with Prof. Andy Way on integration of an existing rule-based open-source machine translation platform with efficient corpus-based machine translation modules and tools. Mikel got an ETS Walton Award to fund this work.
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.
CNGL took on an undergraduate intern as part of the Dublin City University’s INTRA programme. Jian Zhang worked on a toolkit for use in the CNGL CTYI course for 14-17 years olds on Search Engines in DCU. Jian then worked with CNGL researchers in Trinity College Dublin working on adaptive hypermedia software.
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.
Felipe Sánchez Martínez from the Universitat d'Alacant has arrived for a 3-month stay at CNGL. Felipe did his PhD with Prof. Mikel Forcada in Alicante. While he is here is interested primarily in investigating what gains might be found if elements from their RBMT system Apertium were to be combined with elements from our MaTrEx system.
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.
Prof. Josef van Genabith, the director of the new Centre for Next Generation Localisation (CNGL) was on Drivetime with Mary Wilson to tell the show's listeners about the CNGL research agenda, the benefits to the Irish economy and the general public.
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 Institute of Localisation Professionals (TILP), headquartered in Dublin, Ireland, today awarded its 2008 Fellowship to Tony O’Dowd. The TILP Fellowship is being awarded annually to a distinguished personality in the localisation community who has contributed significantly to advance both the work of the Institute and that of the profession as a whole. The award is being made on the recommendation of the TILP Council.
Tony O’Dowd, FILP, is the founder and Managing Director of Alchemy Software Development Ltd.(recently acquired by Translations.com), based in Dublin, Ireland, and one of the world’s first dedicated and leading independent localisation tools developers. In addition to leading Alchemy to continued commercial success over the years, Tony has also made very significant contributions to the localisation community for many years. Amongst these have been significant contributions to TILP’s leading Certified Localisation Professional (CLP) programme and to the facilitation of access to state-of-the-art localisation technologies for students and trainees.
Tony O’Dowd joins a distinguished group of TILP Fellows. Brian Kelly, FILP, founder of Softrans International, Ireland’s first localisation service provider, was awarded the first TILP Fellowship in 2006. Florian Sachse, FILP, of Passolo GmbH (now SDL Passolo) was awarded the 2007 TILP Fellowship.
Reinhard Schäler, CEO of TILP, said “Tony O’Dowd, Florian Sachse and Brian Kelly have earned the universal respect of the localisation community. They have contributed significantly to the development of localisation and TILP for many years. They have done this with a spirit of generosity and openness that is truly exemplary. TILP is extremely proud to have these outstanding personalities as its Fellows.”
“It is an honour for me to have been awarded TILP’s 2008 Fellowship”, said Tony O’Dowd. “TILP is the organization that certifies localisation professionals world-wide, 88 professionals in ten countries in 2008 alone. TILP is active in developed markets as well as in poorer regions of the world. I know that TILP is especially proud of it collaboration with the African Network of Localisation. I look forward to working with the Institute on the further development of its CLP programme over the coming years.”
About TILP: TILP was formally registered as a non-profit organization created “to develop professional practices in localisation globally” on July 30, 2002. In short order, TILP has developed strong industry partnerships and offers a range of membership services. In May 2003, TILP merged with the Professional Association for Localization (PAL) and is now the world’s only industry association based exclusively on individual membership. TILP is the organizer of the Ask the Expert sessions and the Certified Localisation Professional (CLP) programme. Members of the 2008/2009 Council are: Alan Barrett (President), Julieta Coirini (Deputy President), Romina Marazzato (Vice President), Eoin McNamara, Patricia Muñoz Tavira, Peter Reynolds and Angela Starkmann.
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.
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 takes place 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.
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.
DCU hosted the second CNGL bi-annual meetings last week. A collaborative research agreement meeting took place in Invent on Wednesday 8th October. The Scientific Committee Meeting took place on Thursday 9th October and on the morning of Friday 10th October in S206-209 in DCU. A number of PhD students and postdoctoral researchers gave presentations on their research.
CNGL held an public session on Friday afternoon. There was a brief introduction to CNGL from the director, Prof. Josef van Genabith. The keynote was given by Dr. Declan Groves, a senior software developer in Traslán, on Machine Translation in Practice at Traslán. This was followed by a session on the CNGL Education and Outreach Programme given by Ms. Cara Greene and Prof. Harold Somers.
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.
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.
The Localisation Research Centre, in conjunction with CNGL, held the 13th annual Internationalisation and Localisation Conference "LRC XIII - Localization4all" in Marino Institute of Education, Dublin on 2-3 October 2008.
For more information please see the LRC XIII - Localization4all Conference Website.
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 is taking place is Manchester from 18-22 August. CNGL is supporting Coling as a bronze sponsor. CNGL has a boothe at the conference promoting the centre's research and current vacancies. A number of CNGL and NCLT members are attending the conference. Yuqing Guo and Ventsislav Zhechev are presenting papers at Coling.
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 Irish Centre for High-End Computing (ICHEC) ran a series of courses on High Performance Computing (HPC), Message Passing Interface (MPI) and Open Multi-Processing (OpenMP) in the School of Computing, DCU from Monday 28th July - Thursday 31st July 2008. A number of CNGL and NCLT members attended these courses.
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.
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.
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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 is hosting a teacher, Ms. Teresa Nevin, in DCU. Teresa researched and is teaching 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 is working with researchers from CNGL / NCLT who are teaching the arabic language and web design elements.
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.
DCU hosted the Inaugural Convention of the Centre for Next Generation Localisation (CNGL) on Friday May 30th 2008, which included the signing of an Intellectual Property Framework agreement facilitating EUR 14M in industry contributions to the Centre's research.
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CNGL is a Centre for Science Engineering and Technology (CSET) established with funding of EUR 16.8M by Science Foundation Ireland (SFI). The centre brings together thirteen different partners spanning international industry, including IBM, Symantec, Microsoft and Dai Nippon Printing, local SMEs and Irish universities. The industry contribution will bring the total value of the centre to over EUR 30M over 5 years.
The Inaugural CNGL Convention was formally opened by Prof. Ferdinand Prondzynski, President of Dublin City University and was addressed by Prof. Fionn Murtagh, Director of the Information, Communications & Emergent Technologies Directorate at Science Foundation Ireland. A keynote address was given by Jaap van der Meer from The Netherlands, a Language Industry pioneer and Director of the Translation Automation Users Society (TAUS).
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.
There is an article called "A Universal Tongue" in the Innovation and Research Supplement of the Irish Independent. You can read the article here courtesy of Whitespace Publishing.
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.
Prof. Josef van Genabith was on DriveTime with Mary Wilson on December 14th to tell the show's listeners about CNGL research and how this SFI funding will benefit the Irish economy and the general public.
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."
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.
The Minister for Enterprise and Employment, Michael Martin, today announced the award of €16.8m to the project by SFI, and the industry partners are contributing €13.6m in materials, research services and additional funding.
Ireland already has a substantial global footprint in the localisation industry - the process of adapting digital content, download manuals, software and other materials, to different languages and cultures.
The President of DCU, Professor Ferdinand von Prondzynski, said: "This welcome funding is a great endorsement of DCU's international research capability. It means that DCU is now leading two SFI Centres for Science, Engineering and Technology (CSETs) - in biomedical diagnostics and localisation technology - that have won the largest-ever SFI funding in the state"
The Irish project will tackle three critical problems for the Localisation Industry:
Volume: The amount of content to be translated and localised to the destination culture and environment is growing rapidly and massively outstrips the supply of human translators.
Access: Powerful, small devices such as mobile phones and PDAs require novel technologies integrating speech and text to support "on the move" delivery of, and access to multilingual information.
Personalisation: A new demand has rapidly emerged for the adaptation of a huge amount of multilingual content now available on the web, for individual needs. It needs "instant" localisation and personalisation to meet the demands of the users.
Professor Josef van Genabith, Director of the new Centre said: "Localisation as an industrial process was developed in Ireland. We have a unique concentration of university- and industry-based research and development expertise in language technologies, machine translation, speech processing, digital content management and localisation. The research centre is going to pool that expertise and develop the next generation of language and content management technologies to support and develop the localisation industry."
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