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A Network of Excellence forging the
Multilingual Europe Technology Alliance

Collaboration Agreement between ACCEPT and META-NET

 

The Network of Excellence “Technologies for the Multilingual European Information Society”, henceforth META-NET, and the STREP project “ACCEPT - Automated Community Content Editing PorTal”, henceforth ACCEPT, 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

ACCEPT’s mission is to help communities share information more effectively across the language barrier, by improving the quality of machine-translated community content. The ACCEPT project proposes a new approach to help MT work better for community content, in order to ensure that the result is comprehensible and correct. The technology built will help drive take-up of MT in the Web 2.0 paradigm. The ACCEPT project will focus on two slightly different scenarios, a typical commercial product forum and the community of volunteer translators Translators Without Borders (TWB). ACCEPT will allow citizens across the EU better access to communities in both commercial and non-profit environments. It will also make companies in Europe better able to engage with their customers across the language barrier, making them more competitive and allowing them to expand more quickly across Europe. This will bring appreciable industrial and commercial impact. The social impact of the project is highlighted in the participation of TWB, whose main focus is helping European NGOs provide better services in multilingual theatres of operations.

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, consisting 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 projects address the challenge of removing the language barriers allowing citizens across the EU better and efficient cross-language information access. ACCEPT aims to the improvement of technologies for translating community content, and to this end, it will create sophisticated components for machine translation. In this respect, it can provide significant input to META NET, while, at the same time, ACCEPT can benefit from META-NET by synergies for research about novel approaches towards Machine Translation.

Both ACCEPT and META-NET have a strong focus on the advancement of research in the area of machine translation. ACCEPT will develop novel methods to develop statistical machine translation systems targeted to the needs of the project, especially the challenges of limited in-domain parallel corpus training data, and the use of machine translation output in a pre- and post-editing environment. 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.

In order to create synergies in these areas, both projects agree to the following:

  • Discuss the relation between the approaches towards machine translation developed within the two projects in detail, e.g. at a common workshop / video conference calls etc.;

  • Participate in major events with common outreach goals. ACCEPT will participate in META-FORUM 2012 and will be part of the META exhibition that includes all projects collaborating with META-NET;

  • ACCEPT will use the META-SHARE infrastructure, in addition to its own project specific dissemination channels.

 

Signed on behalf of ACCEPT

Signed on behalf of META-NET


Pierrette Bouillon

Coordinator of ACCEPT

 

Hans Uszkoreit

Coordinator of META-NET