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A Network of Excellence forging the
Multilingual Europe Technology Alliance

Collaboration Agreement between SUMAT and META-NET

 

The Network of Excellence “Technologies for the Multilingual European Information Society”, henceforth META-NET, and the STREP project SUMAT, both established within Framework Programme 7, recognise the complementarity of their objectives and declare their intent for multi-level collaboration.

Scope and Objectives of the Participants

The overall aim of the SUMAT project is to increase the efficiency and productivity of the subtitle translation processes via the effective introduction of SMT technologies, in order to foster the circulation of European audiovisual works and promote cultural and linguistic diversity in Europe. SUMAT will develop an online subtitle translation service addressing nine different European languages (English, German, French, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Portuguese, Slovenian and Serbian) combined into fourteen different language pairs, with the aim to semi-automatize at a large scale the subtitle translation processes of both freelance translators and subtitling companies, in order to optimize their efficiency and productivity thereby helping them meet the high market demands.

META-NET is a Network of Excellence dedicated to the technological foundations of the European multilingual information society. Its main goals are: to build a strategic alliance of national and international research programmes, corporate users and commercial technology providers and language communities; to strengthen the European research community through research networking and by creating new schemes and structures for sharing resources, that is the META-SHARE infrastructure; and to build bridges by approaching open problems in collaboration with other research fields such as machine learning, social computing, cognitive systems, knowledge technologies and multimedia content. META-NET will lead to a strong language technology community with ties to other R&D communities, with a network into industry and public administration, and with visions and plans for a strategic research agenda, to support the sustainability of the European, multilingual information society.

Areas of collaboration

Both SUMAT and META-NET are working in the area of machine translation. SUMAT focuses on MT for subtitling, whereas META-NET is focusing on various areas of advancing MT in general: Semantics and MT, Hybrid MT, context and MT, and the empirical base for MT. For both projects, resources for MT are an important aspect. In META-NET, this is the focus of META-SHARE.

Given the above relation of the two projects, the following areas of collaboration are being defined:

  • Both projects will follow each other research and development activities related to machine translation.

  • SUMAT will attend big META-NET events like the META-FORUM series.

  • SUMAT will consider using META-SHARE for distributing its resources specific to MT and subtitling, in addition to its own dissemination channels.

 

Signed on behalf of SUMAT

Signed on behalf of META-NET

Arantza del Pozo

Coordinator of SUMAT

 

Hans Uszkoreit

Coordinator of META-NET