| NSF Org: |
IIS Division of Information & Intelligent Systems |
| Recipient: |
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| Initial Amendment Date: | July 24, 2006 |
| Latest Amendment Date: | July 14, 2009 |
| Award Number: | 0534217 |
| Award Instrument: | Continuing Grant |
| Program Manager: |
Tatiana Korelsky
IIS Division of Information & Intelligent Systems CSE Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering |
| Start Date: | August 1, 2006 |
| End Date: | July 31, 2011 (Estimated) |
| Total Intended Award Amount: | $0.00 |
| Total Awarded Amount to Date: | $763,000.00 |
| Funds Obligated to Date: |
FY 2007 = $260,000.00 FY 2008 = $262,000.00 FY 2009 = $60,000.00 |
| History of Investigator: |
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| Recipient Sponsored Research Office: |
5000 FORBES AVE PITTSBURGH PA US 15213-3815 (412)268-8746 |
| Sponsor Congressional District: |
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| Primary Place of Performance: |
5000 FORBES AVE PITTSBURGH PA US 15213-3815 |
| Primary Place of
Performance Congressional District: |
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| Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): |
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| Parent UEI: |
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| NSF Program(s): |
ASSP-Arctic Social Science, HUMAN LANGUAGE & COMMUNICATION, International Research Collab, Catalyzing New Intl Collab, EAPSI, Robust Intelligence |
| Primary Program Source: |
app-0107 01000809DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT 01000910DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT 0100CYXXDB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT |
| Program Reference Code(s): |
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| Program Element Code(s): |
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| Award Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Fund Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Assistance Listing Number(s): | 47.070 |
ABSTRACT
The LETRAS project investigates novel approaches to development of Machine
Translation (MT) technology, with the goal of establishing a general framework
that supports building MT prototype systems for languages for which only
limited amounts of data and resources in electronic form are available. The
research focus of the project is on automatic learning of translation
transfer-rules from limited amounts of elicited bilingual data. A new run-time
translation "engine" maps source language sentences to their target language
equivalents, by building a large structure of possible partial translations
and then applying effective search techniques for recovering the best
translation. In the last stage, an automatic rule refinement module helps the
system learn how to correct and improve its imperfect translation rules, based
on feedback on translation errors provided by users. MT prototype systems for
several language pairs are being constructed as an integral part of the
project and in collaboration with external research groups. The prototypes
guide our research and test out our new ideas. At the same time, our
collaborations with local researchers and native communities promote the
development of information technology for native languages and educate local
researchers with our state-of-the-art MT research. The prototypes include a
Hebrew-to-English MT system (with University of Haifa, Israel); an
Inupiaq-to-English MT system (with University of Alaska, Fairbanks, and the
Inupiat Heritage Center in Barrow, Alaska); and a Karitiana-to-Portuguese MT
system (with University of Sao Paulo, Brazil). Support for the Alaska
collaboration is being provided by NSF's Office of Polar Programs (OPP), and
support for the collaborations with Israel and Brazil is being provided by
NSF's Office for International Science and Engineering (OISE). OISE is also
providing funding for a planning trip to Bolivia to explore a possible
Aymara-to-Spanish project. The potential long-term impact of the project
is profound - enabling the development of Machine Translation for many
languages of the world, which in turn opens the door for active participation
of native and minority communities in the information-rich activities of the
21st century.
PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH
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