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Type of Talk: UTCS Colloquium

Speaker/Affiliation: Philip R

esnik/University of Maryland

Date/Time: Thursday, September 30, 2010

, 2:00 p.m.

Location: ACES 2.402

Host: Raymond Mooney

Talk

Title: Translation as Collaboration

Talk Abstract:
Although machine

translation has made a great deal of recent progress, fully automatic high
quality translation remains far out of reach for the vast majority of the

world‚s languages. A variety of projects are now using crowdsourcing to t

ap into Web-based communities of people who are willing to help in the tran

slation process, but bilingual expertise is quite sparse compared to the a

vailability of monolingual volunteers. In this talk, I''ll discuss a new

approach to the problem: taking advantage of monolingual human expertise in
tandem with automatic translation. Early empirical results suggest that t

his collaborative approach, combining monolingual crowdsourcing with MT,

may cover significant new ground on the path toward high availability, hig

h quality, cost-effective translation.

This is joint work with Ben Be

derson, Olivia Buzek, Chang Hu, Yakov Kronrod, and Alex Quinn.

Spe

aker Bio:
Philip Resnik is a professor at the University of Maryland, wi

th joint appointments in the Department of Linguistics and at the Institute
for Advanced Computer Studies. He received his Ph.D. in Computer and Info

rmation Science at the University of Pennsylvania in 1993, and has held re

search positions at Bolt Beranek and Newman, IBM TJ Watson Research Center

, and Sun Microsystems Laboratories. His research interests include the c

ombination of knowledge-based and statistical methods in NLP, machine tran

slation, and computational social science.