METIS

Project full title: STATISTICAL MACHINE TRANSLATION USING MONOLINGUAL CORPORA: from concept to

implementation

Project acronym: METIS-IIInstrument: STREP

2004-2007

Brussels, 24 January 2007

Stella Markantonatou

METIS

A brief introduction

METIS-II aims at constructing free text translations by

relying on hybrid techniques employing basic resources retrieving the basic stock for translations

from large monolingual corpora of the target language only

METIS: The aims

METIS is promising for translation pairs where, at least the source language member belongs to the languages endowed with basic computational resources only.

METIS: The promises

Part. role

Part. no

Participant name Part. short name

Part. country

CO 1 Institute for Language and Speech Processing

ILSP GREECE

CR 2 Katholieke Universiteit Leuven KUL BELGIUM

CR 3 Gesellschaft zur Forderung der Angewandten Informationsforschung e.V.

GFAI GERMANY

CR 4 Fundacio Universitat Pompeu Fabra

FUPF SPAIN

METIS: The people

The first prototype runs for the four language pairs Dutch English German English Modern Greek English Spanish English

METIS: The language pairs

METIS: The results

METIS output compares well with SYSTRAN output for some language pairs

Results show that METIS is scalable and upgradeable with respect to quality and size

METIS

as a successful project

Why was METIS successful?1 2 3 4 5 6

METIS has been a positive experience and a successful FET project because the ingredients bid together well

Good idea

1 2 3 4 5 6

Why was METIS successful?

METIS has been a positive experience and a successful FET project because the ingredients bid together well

Good idea

Reasonably good planning

1 2 3 4 5 6

Why was METIS successful?

METIS has been a positive experience and a successful FET project because the ingredients bid together well

Why was METIS successful?

Good idea

Reasonably good planning

Clear and just arrangements

1 2 3 4 5 6

METIS has been a positive experience and a successful FET project because the ingredients bid together well

Why was METIS successful?

Good idea

Reasonably good planning

Clear and just arrangements

Capable people

1 2 3 4 5 6

METIS has been a positive experience and a successful FET project because the ingredients bid together well

Why was METIS successful?

Good idea

Reasonably good planning

Clear and just arrangements

Capable people

Capable sites

1 2 3 4 5 6

METIS has been a positive experience and a successful FET project because the ingredients bid together well

Good idea

Reasonably good planning

Clear and just arrangements

Capable people

Capable sites

Enthusiasm and group

feeling

1 2 3 4 5 6

Why was METIS successful?

METIS has been a positive experience and a successful FET project because the ingredients bid together well

The Idea

intellectually inspiring addressing a real problem mid-term results and applications

lexica, chunkers, lemmatizers long-term results and applications

MT system, improved resources

Good idea

Work planning

Clearly defined phases/steps in the right temporal order --- difficult in a FET

Clear responsibilities for each partner BUT…. initiatives may be vital at project implementation time

Partners do complementary work lemmatizer, chunker, overall architecture design ONE partner responsible for ONE type of work resource creation, algorithm development,

integration, evaluation ALL capable partners have responsibilities

MEETING DEADLINES AND MILESTONES IS NOT JUST A FORMALITY

Reasonably good planning

Finances

Clear and sincere discussion at project planning time about workload and finances

People should feel that they are paid for their work

Partners should feel that finances have been distributed evenly

Responsible behavior of the coordinating site and of the partners at project implementation time

Clear and just arrangements

IPR

Relevant agreements should be made

People should not feel insecure about their work

Ensure Information flow

Clear and just arrangements

The partners

Capable in the scientific area Able to communicate well with each other

(perhaps, it is good to know that in advance) Entertain a keen interest in each other’s work

and consider it work for the PROJECT

Capable people

The coordinator

should …

have clear ideas about the project ensure seamless communication be constantly alert and follow all discussions in the

consortium not panic: a project lasts for several years and the idea

lasts even longer support initiatives is ready/able to mobilize workforce in order to make

sure that quality standards and deadlines are met is ready/able to do some of the work if necessary

In a sense, the coordinator impersonates the project…

Capable people

Capable sites

healthy institutions recover from crisis easier experienced sites communicate their

knowledge to their members and to the consortium

good administrative background makes life much easier

Capable sites

Enthusiasm

well, there are not exactly recipes about that but, still, it is good to have Institutions strongly committed to the

project idea PhD students working for the project Senior scientists specialized in the

domain

Enthusiasm

PEOPLE SHOULD FEEL THAT THEY WORK FOR THEIR OWN PROJECT

AND METIS IS LIKE THAT

ON BEHALF OF THE METIS CONSORTIUM

THANK YOU