Universidad Complutense de Madrid :: NILS mobility project

Venue: Icelandic Centre for Language Technology, Iceland.

From: January 20, 2010

to: June 19, 2010 

Francis Tyers is a PhD student at Universidad de Alicante, Spain. The subjects for his researchare machine translation and natural language processing for under-resourced and marginalised languages.

His project, together with Prof. Hrafn Loftsson, consists of investigating about a machine trasnlation system between Icelandic and English.

About his work:

"My primary subject of research during the past two years has been the development of machine translation systems for under-resourced languages[1,2,3,4]. This year I begin preparing research for my thesis and have settled on the topic of lexical selection for under-resourced languages. Many approaches for lexical selection rely on large amounts of previously created knowledge, such as databases of semantic relationships (e.g. WordNet) or large collections of previously translated texts which are not available for under-resourced languages. Therefore, the methods will necessarily be different.

The primary objective of the research is to investigate different strategies for augmenting the current prototype machine translation system between Icelandic and English developed at Reykjavik University with corpus-based lexical selection. It is my intention to develop language-independent strategies, applicable to under-resourced languages in general. In this project, however, Icelandic will be used as a test case.

Another part of the stay in the ICLT will be to further existing relations between the Transducens research group at the Universitat d'Alacant headed by Mikel L. Forcada and the Icelandic language technology group at the ICLT of which Hrafn Loftsson, Assistant Professor at the School of Computer Science at Reykjavik Univeristy, is a board member.