Collaboration Agreement between TRANSLECTURES and META-NET

The Network of Excellence “Technologies for the Multilingual European Information Society”, henceforth META-NET, and the STREP project “Transcription and Translation of Video Lectures ”, henceforth transLectures, 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 transLectures project is to develop innovative, cost-effective solutions to produce accurate transcriptions and translations in the well-known VideoLectures.NET repository, with generality across other repositories based on the widely used Opencast Matterhorn platform. Our starting hypothesis is that there is only a relatively small gap for the current technology on automatic speech recognition and machine translation to achieve accurate enough results in the kind of audio-visual object collections we are considering; and that this gap can be closed by using massive adaptation and intelligent interaction with users. In order to enable real-life evaluation, integration into Matterhorn is also a main project objective.

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

transLectures objectives are well aligned with the META-NET effort for realising applications that enable automatic translation, multilingual information and knowledge management and content production across all European languages. Given this alignment of objectives, the following areas of collaboration are being defined:

• transLectures will actively participate and exhibit at META events, e.g. META-FORUM;

• transLectures will use META-SHARE for distributing data and tools, in addition to other dissemination channels.