CoSyne: Multilingual Content Synchronization with Wikis

CoSyne: Multilingual Content Synchronization with Wikis, a 3-year (Mar 2010 – Feb 2013) EU-FP7-funded STREP, comprises 4 academic partners (University of Amsterdam, Fond Bruno Kessler, EML Research and Dublin City University) and 3 industrial partners (Deutsche Welle, Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, Vereninging WikiPedia Nederland).

The combination of dynamic user-generated content and multilingual aspects is particularly prominent in Wiki sites. Wikis have gained increased popularity over the last few years as a means of collaborative content creation as they allow users to set up and edit web pages directly. A growing number of organizations use Wikis as an efficient means to provide and maintain information across several sites.

Currently, multilingual Wikis rely on users to manually translate different Wiki pages on the same subject. This is not only a time-consuming procedure but also the source of many inconsistencies, as users update the different language versions separately, and every update would require translators to compare the different language versions and synchronize the updates.

The overall aim of the CoSyne project is to automate the dynamic multi-lingual synchronization process of Wikis.

CoSyne will:

• achieve robust translation of noisier user-generated content between 6 core languages (consisting of 4 core languages and 2 languages with limited resources to demonstrate adaptability of the system),
• improve machine translation quality by segment-specific adaptive modeling,
• identify textual content overlap between segments of Wiki pages across languages to avoid redundant machine translation,
• identify the optimal insertion points for translated content to preserve coherence,
• analyze user edits to distinguish between factual content changes and corrections of machine translation output, and exploit the latter to improve machine translation performance in a self-learning manner.

The components of CoSyne will be integrated through web services with the open-source MediaWiki platform, which is the most commonly used Wiki platform.

The three end-user partners of the consortium will deploy, integrate into their daily workflow, and evaluate the CoSyne system, which will give a clear direction towards the exploitability of the project's outcomes.

Please contact

• Prof. Andy Way or
• Prof. Josef van Genabith