From Inspiration to Commercialization

In 2003, the government of Canada implemented its action plan for official languages with the support of key economic development authorities with Industry Canada in the lead. Following this implementation, the Canadian language industry has been involved in a massive undertaking over the last few years to ensure the industry is well positioned to capitalize on highly promising emerging international opportunities. This undertaking led to the identification of three measures that would give the language industry the boost it needs to emerge as a leader: establishment of an association to coalesce the industry's dynamic forces; creation of a language technology research centre; and development of methods to increase the visibility and reach of the Canadian language industry.

This is now a "fait accompli". The establishment of the Language Industry Association (AILIA) in the Spring of 2003 marked the completion of first step. The second step, the establishment of the Language Technologies Research Centre (LTRC), was completed in April 2005, while the third step, the launch of the Language Industry Portal, has just been finalized.

This bilingual portal is designed to provide Canadian language industry partners and suppliers with a gateway to the Canadian industry and, more specifically, to its flagship organizations - the Language Industry Association (AILIA) and the Language Technologies Research Centre (LTRC). In addition, the portal uses an RSS feed to deliver all of the latest industry news in a format that allows readers to comment and vote on each article. The portal will also include a calendar of upcoming industry events and job postings! All of the information on the site can be browsed by keyword, by month, by topic, by type, and by institution. In short, this is a new and innovative tool that will be constantly improved to meet industry needs!

The UQO Language Studies department is proud to welcome Mr. André Le Meur, renowned expert in documentary and language systems, as a guest professor for the 2007/2008 academic year. His vast knowledge of translation and terminological systems, and his role at the forefront of standardization issues, were key considerations in retaining his services. Having earned a Doctorate in Computer Science, he taught courses on documentary systems and data modelling at the Université de Rennes 2 from 1992 to 2006. In addition, he has been serving as President of the French Commission mirroring TC37/SC3 (terminography) since 1993.

He also served as the technical authority for three projects in the European Community's MLIS (Multilingual Information Society) program: INESTERM, PUBLINET and GEMA (online linguistic resource portal). His work in the field of standardization includes authoring Annex C of ISO 16642: Geneter – Terminology Markup Language (the international standard since 2002). His work in the field of lexicography includes the development of the official template for XmLex dictionaries – ISO 1951, published in 2007. He is currently working on the standardization and certification of formal quality controls for terminological data.

In addition, Mr. Le Meur is working with dictionary publishers and developers of computer-assisted translation applications to integrate lexicographical data into the translation process. He is also working on the development of tools to facilitate the use of the European Community's aligned multilingual corpus. He is particularly interested in the convergence of technical documents and standardized linguistic data that can be achieved through the generalization of the XML markup language and the impact of these developments on the work of language professionals.

Mr. Le Meur's tenure at UQO will surely be extremely beneficial not only to his students, but also to his colleagues in the Language Studies department and the Language Technologies Research Centre (LTRC).

As announced during the AILIA Tradeshow on November 30th, and following its offer of research and education licences to Canadian universities since 2006, the NRC wishes to foster the development of Canadian expertise in Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) in partnership with Canadian companies.

The fully operational basic version of the PORTAGE software system – called PORTAGEshared – is now offered to Canadian companies as source code and executable code, for evaluation purposes. The PORTAGEshared system will enable interested Canadian companies to start in-house SMT activities quickly and to evaluate the potential contribution of SMT to their business model, without having to spend a lot of time setting up a fully operational basic SMT system.

For further information, please contact:

Michel Mellinger, Interactive Language Technologies Group, NRC
Ph. : +1 819 934-2602, e-mail : Michel.Mellinger@cnrc-nrc.gc.ca

Since 2006, the Interactive Language Technologies Group (NRC) works in collaboration with Job Bank (Service Canada) with the objective of evaluating the potential contribution of statistical machine translation (SMT) to the post-editing of draft translations. Tests have been very successful and resulted, to date, in three scientific publications about the use of SMT in post-editing. The presentation, during the international conference MT Summit XI in Copenhagen (September 2007), of the latest results from this work has attracted much interest from the audience as well as from users of automated translation.

In summary, the combination of rule-based machine translation (commercial system) followed by processing by an automatic post-editing module based on PORTAGE (NRC's SMT system) resulted in a significant improvement of the quality of a draft translation to be reviewed by a translator. It would thereby permit a significant reduction in the human post-editing task, and as a result, would permit the improvement of the overall productivity of a translation system based on automated translation technologies.

The publications noted above are available on request, please contact:

Michel Mellinger, Interactive Language Technologies Group, NRC
Ph. : +1 819 934-2602, e-mail : Michel.Mellinger@cnrc-nrc.gc.ca

David Nadeau, previously with the Copernic company (now Coveo), joined the Interactive Language Technologies Group of NRC at its very beginning, in 2004, where he worked on several Natural Language Processing projects, the best-known of which resulted in the Barçah terminometry software.

While still a part-time employee of NRC, David more recently focused on completing a Ph.D. at the University of Ottawa and he defended successfully his Ph.D. thesis last October. For his thesis topic, David developed a named entity recognition software called YooName (www.YooName.com) for which he foresees interesting commercial applications.

To pursue commercial opportunities in this area, David decided last November to go on his own and started a new company.

All the best, David!

The LTRC thanks the readers of Cybermag-TL for their interest and for helping to disseminate the newsletter. This online information magazine, which is also posted on the LTRC’s website, is designed to keep language industry and information technology partners and stakeholders up to date with the latest news from the LTRC. Please continue to spread the word among your colleagues, and contact us with your feedback, suggestions and comments!

Language Technologies Research Centre
283 Alexandre-Taché Boulevard
P.O. Box 1250, Hull Branch
Gatineau QC J8X 3X7
Tel. : (819) 595-3999
info@ltrc.ca

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