Informatisches Sonderkolloquium Hamburg
Der Vortrag findet am Mittwoch, 1.3.06, 10:00 Uhr im Informatikum, Konrad-Zuse-Hörsaal, Gebäude B, Vogt-Kölln-Str. 30, Hamburg-Stellingen statt.
1.3.2006

Prof. Dr. Hans Uszkoreit und Feiyu Xu
German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI)

Crosslingual Technology in Mobile Information Systems and New Developments in MT

The COMPASS system provides various information services for foreign visitors and participants of the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing. Users should be able to access information about the city, the weather, the Olympic contests and other events at any time. Furthermore, the foreigners can make use of the translation services for communicating with local people in typical situations, e.g., ordering food in a Chinese restaurant, dialogue with a Taxi driver and a precise understanding in the case of an emergency. A modular platform accommodates the addition of new services and the combination of existing services.

The application is a bundle of web-based mobile multilingual information services for the visitors of large international events. Since most of the information is not produced in all of the offered languages, crosslingual technologies need to be employed for overcoming the existing language barriers. The application scenario is the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, a highly demanding setting for a crosslingual application because of the heterogeneous nature of the information and the involved languages.

If machine translation was reliable and robust enough to support the mapping of all provided information to the languages of the users, one general high-quality MT system would be sufficient to turn monolingual information services into the desired multilingual system. The current state of the art in machine translation, however, does not provide the degree of reliability required for the intended services. When foreign visitors need help in Beijing, they often are in situations in which they do not have the time and patience to cope with faulty or unintelligible information. Therefore our services try to circumvent the fully automatic translation by a general purpose MT system whenever possible.

The three main approaches employed in COMPASS for crossing the language boundaries are mutlilingual generation, phrasebook translation and free machine translation. For each approach, we exploit existing resources whenever possible. Among such resources are monolingual and bilingual dictionaries, terminologies, tourist phrasebooks, and existing MT systems. Some additional resources that had to be developed were designed in such a way that the resources could be reused by future applications. An example is the ontologies for the service features and for some application specific domains that are designed in RDF schema.

In our conclusion, we will discuss the prospects of new developments in MT for practical applications exhibiting a demand on robustness or accuracy.

Kontakt
Kontakt: Prof. Dr. Walther von Hahn
Telefon +49 40 42883 2434