DCU MT GROUP RELEASES FREE/OPEN-SOURCE EBMT SYSTEM ‘MARCLATOR’

The Centre for Next Generation’s (CNGL) Machine Translation group, led by Prof.
Andy Way at Dublin City University (DCU), announces the release of ‘Marclator’
(Marker-based Translator), a free/open-source system for Example Based Machine
Translation (EBMT).  This release coincides with the 4th MT Marathon, a
week-long event being hosted January 25th-30th by the CNGL and the National
Centre for Language Technology (NCLT) at DCU in conjunction with the EuroMatrix+
project, where over 100 participants from 20 countries will have a chance to
test and program open-source MT tools and systems.

The Marclator EBMT system release includes a fully functional marker-based
chunker/tagger (based on Green’s “marker hypothesis”) with markers for some
languages and a chunk aligner, as well as a proof-of-concept ‘naïve’ (monotone)
recombination module or ‘decoder’.

This free/open-source release results from collaboration with Prof. Mikel L.
Forcada of Universitat d’Alacant in Spain who is currently a visiting researcher
within the CNGL MT group at DCU through an ETS Walton Award from Science
Foundation Ireland (SFI).

Through SFI funding of the Centre for Next Generation Localisation and
additional funding from EU FP7 research projects currently coming on stream, DCU
now boasts one of the largest academic research groups focused on MT worldwide.
 The Marclator release is seen as a ‘first-step’ in a strategy of participation
in the free/open-source community in parallel with a programme of commercial
engagement with companies interested in adopting, tuning and deploying machine
translation technology.

Over the past number of years, Prof Andy Way has led the MT group at DCU in
pursuing corpus-based approaches to MT, which have culminated in the MaTrEx
system, a modular, maintainable and efficient data-driven machine translation
system which combines example-based machine translation (EBMT) and statistical
machine translation (SMT) and which consistently ranks as one of the
top-performing MT systems in open machine translation evaluations (e.g. WMT-09,
IWSLT-09, etc.).

As a follow-on to the Marclator release, Prof. Way and Prof. Forcada will
continue to collaborate toward a free/open-source release of a baseline MaTrEx
system, combining Marclator with the Moses SMT decoder.  This OpenMaTrEx release
is anticipated for Spring 2010.

Resources:      
http://www.cngl.ie
http://nclt.dcu.ie/mt
http://www.computing.dcu.ie/~mforcada/fosmt.html
http://www.computing.dcu.ie/~mforcada/marclator.html
http://www.euromatrixplus.net/
http://www.mtmarathon2010.info/web/Welcome.html

For more information please contact: [email protected]



Mikel L. Forcada <[email protected]>
Dept. Llenguatges i Sistemes Informàtics
Universitat d\\\'Alacant, E-03071 Alacant (Spain)
Tel.: +34 96 590 9776    Fax: +34 96 590 9326
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