Report by Yi Fan He and Paraic Sheridan of CNGL
The 4th annual MT Marathon was held over five days during January in Dublin, hosted by the National Centre for Language Technology and the Centre for Next Generation Localisation (CNGL) as a partner in the EuroMatrixPlus consortium, which aims to provide a major boost to MT technology by applying the most advanced MT technologies systematically to all pairs of EU languages. Previous the MT Marathons had been held in Edinburgh (2007), Berlin/Wandlitz (2008) and Prague (2009).
Researchers, developers, students, and users of machine translation technology from all over the world attend lectures and labs introducing them over the course of days to the latest research in the field. More than 100 participants from 20 countries came to Dublin to join this year’s event.
Proposals were solicited for open-source MT projects on which developers and researchers could collaborate during the lab sessions of the Marathon. Over twenty open-source project ideas were submitted this year, of which seventeen received development support during the course of the Marathon.
