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A Network of Excellence forging the
Multilingual Europe Technology Alliance

Collaboration Agreement between CoSyne and META-NET

The Network of Excellence “Technologies for the Multilingual European Information Society”, henceforth META-NET, and the STREP project “Multilingual Content Synchronization with Wikis”, henceforth CoSyne, 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 CoSyne project is to automate the dynamic multilingual synchronization process of Wikis. Currently, multilingual Wikis rely on users for translation of content – a time consuming procedure that leads to many inconsistencies and human overhead for synchronization across languages. CoSyne will help to achieve robust machine translation of noisier user generated content in multilingual Wikis. It will 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, and 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 widely deployed open-source MediaWiki platform.

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 CoSyne and META-NET have a strong focus on the advancement of research in the area of machine translation. In CoSyne, two work packages are of high relevance for this goal: WP3 “Adaptive and Self-Learning Machine Translation”, and WP5 “WP5 Machine Translation Evaluation”. In META-NET, the relevant work packages are WP1-4: “Bringing more Semantics into Translation”, “Optimising the Division of Labour in Hybrid MT”, “Exploiting the Context for MT”, and “Empirical Base for Machine Translation”.

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

  • Share information about the current state in the various work packages on a regular basis;

  • 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., and publish a paper with conclusions until mid 2012;

  • Participate in major events with common outreach goals. CoSyne will participate in the META-FORUM 2011 and will be part of the META exhibition that includes all projects collaborating with META-NET.

  • CoSyne will make its results, e.g. a robust machine translation component, available through META-SHARE, in addition to its own dissemination channels.

 

Signed on behalf of CoSyne

Signed on behalf of META-NET

Caroline Van Impelen

Coordinator of CoSyne

 

Hans Uszkoreit

Coordinator of META-NET