Findings of the 2019 Conference on Machine Translation (WMT19)

This paper presents the results of the premier shared task organized alongside the Conference on Machine Translation (WMT) 2019. Participants were asked to build machine translation systems for any of 18 language pairs, to be evaluated on a test set of news stories. The main metric for this task is human judgment of translation quality. The task was also opened up to additional test suites to probe specific aspects of translation

META-NORD: Towards Sharing of Language Resources in Nordic and Baltic Countries

This paper introduces the META-NORD project which develops Nordic and Baltic part of the European open language resource infrastructure. META-NORD works on assembling, linking across languages, and making widely available the basic language resources used by developers, professionals and researchers to build specific products and applications. The goals of the project, overall approach and specific focus lines on wordnets, terminology resources and treebanks are described. Moreover, results achieved in first five months of the project, i.e. language whitepapers, metadata specification and IPR, are presented.Peer reviewe

Machine Translation and Neural Networks for a multilingual EU

This paper presents an overview of the current developments and use of Machine Translation (MT) and Neural Machine Translation (NMT), specifically eTranslation, in the European Institutions. An insight into the state-of-the-art of NMT as currently in development in the Directorate-General for Translation (DG TRAD) of the European Parliament is provided by Pascale Chartier-Brun. Problems in machine translation support requiring further research and development for processing languages with complex morphosyntax are discussed in the outlook. This paper was developed from the presentation “IT integrated environment for optimising the translation of legislative documents in the EP“ by Pascale Chartier-Brun at the workshop “Europäische Rechtslinguistik und Digitale Möglichkeiten / EU Legal Linguistics and Digital Perspectives“, held at the University of Cologne July 7th/8th, 2017

META-NORD: Baltic and Nordic Branch of the European Open Linguistic Infrastructure

Proceedings of the NODALIDA 2011 Workshop Visibility and Availability of LT Resources. Editors: Sjur Nørstebø Moshagen and Per Langgård. NEALT Proceedings Series, Vol. 13 (2011), 18–22. © 2011 The editors and contributors. Published by Northern European Association for Language Technology (NEALT) http://omilia.uio.no/nealt . Electronically published at Tartu University Library (Estonia) http://hdl.handle.net/10062/1697

Proceedings

Proceedings of the Workshop CHAT 2011: Creation, Harmonization and Application of Terminology Resources. Editors: Tatiana Gornostay and Andrejs Vasiļjevs. NEALT Proceedings Series, Vol. 12 (2011). © 2011 The editors and contributors. Published by Northern European Association for Language Technology (NEALT) http://omilia.uio.no/nealt . Electronically published at Tartu University Library (Estonia) http://hdl.handle.net/10062/16956

Proceedings

Proceedings of the NODALIDA 2011 Workshop Visibility and Availability of LT Resources. Editors: Sjur Nørstebø Moshagen and Per Langgård. NEALT Proceedings Series, Vol. 13 (2011), vi+32 pp. © 2011 The editors and contributors. Published by Northern European Association for Language Technology (NEALT) http://omilia.uio.no/nealt . Electronically published at Tartu University Library (Estonia) http://hdl.handle.net/10062/1697

Multilingual Named Entity Recognition through Data and Model Transfer

Maisterintutkielma käsittelee monikielistä nimien tunnistusta. Tutkielmassa testataan kahta lähestymistapaa monikieliseen nimien tunnistukseen: annotoidun datan siirtoa toisille kielille, sekä monikielisen mallin luomista. Lisäksi nämä kaksi lähestymistapaa yhdistetään. Tarkoitus on löytää menetelmiä, joilla nimien tunnistusta voidaan tehdä luotettavasti myös pienemmillä kielillä, joilla annotoituja nimientunnistusaineistoja ei ole suuressa määrin saatavilla. Tutkielmassa koulutetaan ja testataan malleja neljällä kielellä: suomeksi, viroksi, hollanniksi ja espanjaksi. Ensimmäisessä metodissa annotoitu data siirretään kieleltä toiselle monikielisen paralleelikorpuksen avulla, ja näin syntynyttä dataa käytetään neuroverkkoja hyödyntävän koneoppimismallin opettamiseen. Toisessa metodissa käytetään monikielistä BERT-mallia. Mallin koulutukseen käytetään annotoituja korpuksia, jotka yhdistetään monikieliseksi opetusaineistoksi. Kolmannessa metodissa kaksi edellistä metodia yhdistetään, ja kieleltä toiselle siirrettyä dataa käytetään monikielisen BERT-mallin koulutuksessa. Kaikkia kolmea lähestymistapaa testataan kunkin kielen annotoidulla testisetillä, ja tuloksia verrataan toisiinsa. Metodi, jossa rakennettiin monikielinen BERT-malli, saavutti selkeästi parhaimmat tulokset nimien tunnistamisessa. Neuroverkkomallit, jotka koulutettiin kielestä toiseen siirretyillä annotaatioilla, saivat selkeästi heikompia tuloksia. BERT-mallin kouluttaminen siirretyillä annotaatioilla tuotti myös heikkoja tuloksia. Annotaatioiden siirtäminen kieleltä toiselle osoittautui haastavaksi, ja tuloksena syntynyt data sisälsi virheitä. Tulosten heikkouteen vaikutti myös opetusaineiston ja testiaineiston kuuluminen eri genreen. Monikielinen BERT-malli on tutkielman mukaan testatuista parhaiten toimiva metodi, ja sopii myös kielille, joilla annotoituja aineistoja ei ole paljon saatavilla

The European language technology landscape in 2020: Language-centric and human-centric AI for cross-cultural communication in multilingual Europe

Multilingualism is a cultural cornerstone of Europe and firmly anchored in the European treaties including full language equality. However, language barriers impacting business, cross-lingual and cross-cultural communication are still omnipresent. Language Technologies (LTs) are a powerful means to break down these barriers. While the last decade has seen various initiatives that created a multitude of approaches and technologies tailored to Europe’s specific needs, there is still an immense level of fragmentation. At the same time, AI has become an increasingly important concept in the European Information and Communication Technology area. For a few years now, AI – including many opportunities, synergies but also misconceptions – has been overshadowing every other topic. We present an overview of the European LT landscape, describing funding programmes, activities, actions and challenges in the different countries with regard to LT, including the current state of play in industry and the LT market. We present a brief overview of the main LT-related activities on the EU level in the last ten years and develop strategic guidance with regard to four key dimensions.publishedVersio