The EuroMatrix is a project that ran from September 2006 to February 2009. The project aimed to develop and improve machine translation (MT) systems between all official languages of the European Union (EU). EuroMatrix was followed up by another project EuroMatrixPlus (March 2009 to February 2012).

Approach to translation

EuroMatrix explored using linguistic knowledge in

statistical machine translation Statistical machine translation (SMT) is a machine translation paradigm where translations are generated on the basis of statistical models whose parameters are derived from the analysis of bilingual text corpora. The statistical approach contrast ...

. Statistical techniques were combined with rule-based approach, resulting in hybrid MT architecture. The project experimented with combining methods and resources from statistical MT, rule-based MT, shallow language processing and computational lexicography and morphology.

Project objectives

EuroMatrix focused on high-quality translation for the publication of technical, social, legal and political documents. It applied advanced MT technologies to all pairs of EU languages; languages of new and likely-to-become EU member states were also taken into account.

Annual international evaluation

Competitive annual international evaluation of machine translation meetings (“MT marathons”) were organized to bring together MT researchers. Participants of the marathons translated test sets with their systems. The test sets were then evaluated by manual as well as automatic metrics. MT marathons were multi-day happenings consisting of several events — summer school, lab lessons, research talks, workshops, open source conventions, research showcases.

List of MT marathons

{, class="wikitable" , - ! Name !! Date !! Place , - , Machine Translation Marathon 2007, , April 16–20, 2007, , Edinburgh, United Kingdom , - , Machine Translation Marathon 2008, , May 12–17, 2008, , Berlin, Germany , - , Machine Translation Marathon 2009, , January 26–30, 2009, , Prague, Czech Republic

Outcome

Several tools and resources were created or supported by the project:Tools and resources
/ref> * Moses, an open source statistical machine translation engine * Europarl Corpus, version 3 * Results from Workshops on Statistical Machine Translation (2007, 2008, 2009) * CzEng Corpus, version 0.7

Funding

The EuroMatrix project was sponsored by EU Information Society Technology program. Total cost of the project was 2 358 747 €, from which the European Union contributed 2 066 388 €.

Project members

Experienced research groups in machine translation that are internationally recognized, as well as relevant industrial partners participated in the project. The consortium included the

University of Edinburgh The University of Edinburgh ( sco, University o Edinburgh, gd, Oilthigh Dhùn Èideann; abbreviated as ''Edin.'' in post-nominals) is a public research university based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Granted a royal charter by King James VI in 15 ...

(United Kingdom),

Charles University ) , image_name = Carolinum_Logo.svg , image_size = 200px , established = , type = Public, Ancient , budget = 8.9 billion CZK , rector = Milena Králíčková , faculty = 4,057 , administrative_staff = 4,026 , students = 51,438 , underg ...

(Czech Republic), Saarland University (Germany), Center for the Evaluation of Language and Communication Technologies (Italy), MorphoLogic (Hungary), and GROUP Technologies AG (Germany).cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/80463_en.html
/ref> The project was coordinated by Hans Uszkoreit, a professor of Computational Linguistics at Saarland University.

References

External links

official homepage

EuroMatrixPlus official homepage
College and university associations and consortia in Europe Information technology organizations based in Europe Machine translation