Grant will support the improvement of language translation applications crucial for the development of future Sino-American relations

As the United States and China move forward in both collaboration and competition, the ability to communicate becomes ever more critical. While emerging technologies such as Google Translate have shown promise, much work must be done to improve the language translation applications that America will need as one of its most important 21st century relationships develops.

According to an article by Susan Chaityn Lebovits, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has awarded the $13.7 million grant to the Linguistic Data Consortium at the University of Pennsylvania to develop linguistic resources and move the technology forward. Brandeis University will receive $2 million of that amount as a collaborator.

Nianwen Xue, assistant professor of linguistics in the Language and Computational Linguistics Program and the Department of Computer Science at Brandeis, is the principal investigator on the four-year project. Xue’s team is focused on data preparation.

“The goal is to develop the technologies and in order to get those technologies we have to create resources annotated with linguistic structures,” says Xue. “We will then use machine-learning technologies to produce annotations automatically.”

Collaborators and other program participants will use the products of the Brandeis team to develop their own systems.

Alex Dupont

See Also

• More about machine translation
  Machine Translation in itself is not good enough if you require a translation of publishable quality
• DARPA grant to support research into auto-translation of Chinese by Susan Chaityn Lebovits
  As the U.S. and China move forward in both collaboration and competition, the ability to communicate becomes ever more critical