Towards European Infrastructure for Automated Translation

Andrejs Vasiļjevs

CEO

TAUS Industry Leaders Forum, Berlin, June 1, 2015

Language Technologies for Multilingual Digital Single Market

24 official languages of EU create

barriers that prevent all European

consumers from fully engaging in

online activities and restricts access

to digital assets.

European Union Vision:Cracking the language barrier

By 2025, an online EU internal market free of language barriers

– delivering automatic translation quality, equal to currently best performing language pair/direction

– in most relevant use situations

– for at least 90% of the EU official languages

European Union Vision:Cracking the language barrier

Significant improvement in quality, coverage and technical maturity of MT for at least half of the 21 EU languages that currently have "weak or no support" or "fragmentary support" of MT solutions, according to the META-NET Language White Papers

European Union Vision:Cracking the language barrier

Large contributions of language resources and language technology tools from all EU Member States and Associated countries to:

– a single platform for sharing, maintaining and making use of language resources and tools;

– establishing widely agreed benchmarks for machine translation quality,

– stimulating competition between methods and systems

04/14/20236

CEF – Connecting Europe Facility

• A funding programme for infrastructures and deployment of digital services:

– CEF Transport

– CEF Energy

– CEF Telecommunication

• Broadband

• Digital Services

• Deploys mature technologies to build, enable and operate pan-European Digital Services (and roads and energy grids)

• Automated translation building block: machine translation engines and specialised language resources including the necessary tools and programming interfaces needed to operate the pan-European digital services in a multilingual environment.

Automated Translation

• Automated Translation is a "building block" which will serve the other Digital Services Infrastructures in CEF

• Automated Translation should provide whatever is needed to make DSIs actually multilingual

• Adaptable machine translation and relevant Language Resources are central

• Other likely key areas: CAT, CMS, terminology, semantic interoperability, interfaces to various systems and data types

• Human element is essential: service provision, quality control, validation, post-editing, on-demand response...

Deliver the strategic vision, functional, technical and operational specifications of the infrastructure for EU public service for automated translation and other multilingual services and resources

MLi Project

CEF.AT Current tasks

MT@EC system provides initial Automated Translation services:

• extending its language coverage and functionalities to allow provision of small-scale implementations of customised automated translation services to three mature or operational CEF DSIs;

• providing input to the requirements analysis and architecture specification tasks, especially deriving information from the small-scale implementations

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CEF.AT European Language Resource Coordination

Setting up a coordination mechanism and governance structure that:

• Allows language resources from various sources to be made accessible and interoperable.

• Includes liaising with relevant Member State administrations in view of transferring linguistic assets and knowledge to improve the coverage and quality of the Automated Translation service.

• Improves the situation of those EU languages that currently have poor coverage in terms of automated translation solutions.

HUGO.LVLATVIATRANSLATES WITH

• Machine translation service for the Latvian public sector

• Securely translates texts, documents, websites• Adapted for the Latvian language and public sector

texts• Integrated into e-services and government websites• Languages

• Latvian-English• English-Latvian• Latvian-Russian Developed by

Towards EU Multilingual Infrastructure

• The role of European Commission - developer and operator or procurement body to ensure the service?

• How to fulfill immense complexity and diversity of the needs?

– Real time translation for all 24 EU languages

– Multitude of user groups

– Diversity of domains

– Variety of quality requirements

– Variety of genres, styles, formats, applications

– etc.

• How to get use of the Europe’s best technologies, research and entrepreneurial talent?

?

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Thank you!

@MLiProject

facebook.com/mliproject

andrejs@tilde.com