With 24 official EU and many additional languages, multilingualism in Europe and an inclusive Digital Single Market can only be enabled through Language Technologies (LTs). European LT business is dominated by hundreds of SMEs and a few large players. Many are world-class, with technologies that outperform the global players. However, European LT business is also fragmented – by nation states, languages, verticals and sectors, significantly holding back its impact. The European Language Grid (ELG) project addresses this fragmentation by establishing the ELG as the primary platform for LT in Europe. The ELG is a scalable cloud platform, providing, in an easy-to-integrate way, access to hundreds of commercial and non-commercial LTs for all European languages, including running tools and services as well as data sets and resources. Once fully operational, it will enable the commercial and non-commercial European LT community to deposit and upload their technologies and data sets into the ELG, to deploy them through the grid, and to connect with other resources. The ELG will boost the Multilingual Digital Single Market towards a thriving European LT community, creating new jobs and opportunities. Furthermore, the ELG project organises two open calls for up to 20 pilot projects. It also sets up 32 national competence centres and the European LT Council for outreach and coordination purposes.

We present the latest version of the SUMMA platform, an open-source software platform for monitoring and interpreting multi-lingual media, from written news published on the internet to live media broadcasts via satellite or internet streaming.

We investigate techniques for supervised domain adaptation for neural machine translation where an existing model trained on a large out-of-domain dataset is adapted to a small in-domain dataset.In this scenario, overfitting is a major challenge.We investigate a number of techniques to reduce overfitting and improve transfer learning, including regularization techniques such as dropout and L2regularization towards an out-of-domain prior.In addition, we introduce tuneout, a novel regularization technique inspired by dropout.We apply these techniques, alone and in combination, to neural machine translation, obtaining improvements on IWSLT datasets for English→German and English→Russian.We also investigate the amounts of in-domain training data needed for domain adaptation in NMT, and find a logarithmic relationship between the amount of training data and gain in BLEU score.

CASMACAT is a modular, web-based translation workbench that offers advanced functionalities for computer-aided translation and the scientific study of human translation: automatic interaction with machine translation (MT) engines and translation memories (TM) to obtain raw translations or close TM matchesn for conventional post-editing; interactive translation prediction based on an MT engine’s search graph, detailed recording and replay of edit actions and translator’s gaze (the latter via eye-tracking), and the support of e-pen as an alternative input device. The system is open source sofware and interfaces with multiple MT systems.

We present C*ST*RD, a cross-language information delivery system that supports cross-language information retrieval, information space visualization and navigation, machine translation, and text summarization of single documents and clusters of documents. C*ST*RD was assembled and trained within 1 month, in the context of DARPA's Surprise Language Exercise, that selected as source a heretofore unstudied language, Hindi. Given the brief time, we could not create deep Hindi capabilities for all the modules, but instead experimented with combining shallow Hindi capabilities, or even English-only modules, into one integrated system. Various possible configurations, with different tradeoffs in processing speed and ease of use, enable the rapid deployment of C*ST*RD to new languages under various conditions.

A good decoding algorithm is critical to the success of any statistical machine translation system. The decoder's job is to find the translation that is most likely according to set of previously learned parameters (and a formula for combining them). Since the space of possible translations is extremely large, typical decoding algorithms are only able to examine a portion of it, thus risking to miss good solutions. In this paper, we compare the speed and output quality of a traditional stack-based decoding algorithm with two new decoders: a fast greedy decoder and a slow but optimal decoder that treats decoding as an integer-programming optimization problem.

We present a rule-based, deterministic dependency parser for Japanese. It was implemented in C++, using object classes that reflect linguistic concepts and thus facilitate the transfer of linguistic intuitions into code. The parser first chunks morphemes into one-word phrases and then parses from the right to the left. The average parsing accuracy is 83.6%.