RGCL Anniversary Highlights, Day 15

Published on Aug, 26 2022 by RGCL.

The EXPERT project

The EXPERT (EXPloiting Empirical appRoaches to Translation) project ran from 2012 to 2016 and, thanks to the coordinating staff members in RGCL, brought more than €800,000 to the University. The aim of the project was to train young researchers, namely Early Stage Researchers (ESRs) and Experienced Researchers (ERs), and to promote the research, development and use of hybrid language translation technologies. EXPERT’s main objective was to provide innovative research and training in the field of Translation memory and Machine Translation Technologies to 16 Marie Curie Fellows. The project appointed 12 PhD students and six postdoctoral researchers to work on a variety of project related to hybrid language translation technologies ranging from investigating the requirements of users and collection of data, to the development of hybrid methods and new evaluation metrics.

Constantin Orasan presenting some of the findings of the EXPERT project

The project was funded to the tune of €4million under the FP7 Marie Curie ITN scheme, coordinated by RGCL’s Constantin Orasan and delivered by a consortium featuring six academic partners: University of Wolverhampton, UK; University of Malaga, Spain; University of Sheffield, UK; Saarland University, Germany; Dublin City University, Ireland and University of Amsterdam, Netherlands, as well as three industrial partners: Pangeanic, Spain; Translated, Italy; and Hermes, Spain. In addition, the consortium benefitted from the contribution of four associated partners: WordFast, France; Etrad, Argentina; Unbabel, Portugal; and DFKI, Germany.

Members of the extended EXPERT project team, including RGCL’s Constantin Orasan, Rohit Gupta and Iain Mansell

The individual projects carried out by the EXPERT fellows together with their supervisors produced research that advanced the state of the art related to data-driven and hybrid machine translation. The project overlapped with the period when the field of machine translation was making the transition from statistical machine translation to neural machine translation. The researchers involved in the EXPERT project made great contributions to this newly emerged paradigm, and we are especially grateful to Constantin Orasan for his originality, dedication, hard work and enthusiasm which were vital to the project’s success.

General details about the project can be found in:
Orăsan, C. (2016) The EXPERT Project: Training the Future Experts in Translation Technology, In Proceedings of the 19th Annual Conference of the EAMT: Projects/Products, Riga, Latvia, p. 393. http://www.bjmc.lu.lv/fileadmin/user_upload/lu_portal/projekti/bjmc/Contents/4_2_28_Products.pdf

The project produced more than 160 publications and numerous resources. Some of them can be found at http://expert-itn.eu/.