QT21

  This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 645452.  

Title

QT21: Quality Translation 21

Concept

A European Digital Single Market free of barriers, including language barriers, is a stated EU objective to be achieved by 2020. The findings of the META-NET Language White Papers show that currently only 3 of the EU-27 languages enjoy moderate to good support by our machine translation technologies, with either weak (at best fragmentary) or no support for the vast majority of the EU-27 languages. This lack is a key obstacle impeding the free flow of people, information and trade in the European Digital Single Market. Many of the languages not supported by our current technologies show common traits: they are morphologically complex, with free and diverse word order. Often there are not enough training resources and/or processing tools. Together this results in drastic drops in translation quality. The combined challenges of linguistic phenomena and resource scenarios have created a large and under-explored grey area in the language technology map of European languages. Combining support from key stakeholders, QT21 addresses this grey area developing (1) substantially improved statistical and machine-learning based translation models for challenging languages and resource scenarios, (2) improved evaluation and continuous learning from mistakes, guided by a systematic analysis of quality barriers, informed by human translators, (3) all with a strong focus on scalability, to ensure that learning and decoding with these models is efficient and that reliance on data (annotated or not) is minimised.

Participants

• Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz GmbH, Germany (Coordinator)
• Universiteit van Amsterdam, Netherlands
• Dublin City University, Ireland
• The University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom
• Karlsruher Institut für Technologie, Germany
• Centre national de la recherche scientifique CNRS, France
• Univerzita Karlova, Czechia
• Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Italy
• The University of Sheffield, United Kingdom
• TAUS B.V., Netherlands
• text & form GmbH, Germany
• Tilde SIA, Latvia
• Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong