Bill Dolan
Principal Researcher; Manager NLP Group
Talk: "Building Partnerships with Language Communities: The Importance of Shared Technology and Shared Data"
This talk will focus on Microsoft Research’s ongoing work to build collaborative partnerships around machine translation data and technologies.
The first part of the presentation will focus on the very successful partnership between MSR and the Latvian company Tilde, which involved working together to build and deploy a high-quality English-Latvian translation engine on http://microsofttranslator.com. As part of this effort, Tilde and MSR mounted an innovative data crowdsourcing effort in Latvia, generating English-Latvian parallel data that will be released to the community.
The remainder of the presentation will focus on WikiBhasha (“Wiki” + Sanskrit “Word”), an open-source, browser-based application released by MSR in October 2010. WikiBhasha is aimed at helping users create multilingual Wikipedia content by post-editing machine-generated translations of English Wikipedia pages. The resulting text is published back to Wikipedia. This beta release is part of MSR’s effort to build a suite of tools to help users build multilingual content, and to ensure that the resulting content is freely available to researchers and community members. WikiBhasha is aimed particularly at creating content in low-resource languages that might otherwise be left behind as machine translation technology lowers language barriers to commerce and intellectual exchange on the web.
Short Biography
Bill Dolan is Principal Researcher and manager of the Natural Language Processing group at Microsoft Research, Redmond. He holds an undergraduate degree from the University of California at Berkeley, and a PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles.
