CRACKER (Cracking the Language Barrier: Coordination, Evaluation and Resources for European MT Research)

CRACKER is a Machine Translation (MT) research initiative involving 7 major universities and research institutions (DFKI, FBK, Charles University, University of Edinburgh, University of Sheffield, Athena Research and Innovation Center in Information, Communication and Knowledge Technologies, and ELDA). Its goal is to cope with the striking disproportion between the scope of current MT challenges and the available resources, especially for translation to and from languages that have only fragmentary or no technological support at all. The nucleus of CRACKER’s research, development, and innovation strategy towards high-quality MT is the group of projects funded through H2020-ICT-17a/b (partly extending to relevant FP7 actions such as QTLeap, LIDER and MLi). This nucleus was be supported by CRACKER (ICT-17c) in coordination, evaluation and resources. In order to achieve its challenging goals, CRACKER was build upon, consolidate and extend initiatives for collaborative MT research supported by earlier EU-funded actions. These include evaluation campaigns such as the Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation (WMT) and the International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT), the META-SHARE open infrastructure for sharing language resources and technologies with extensions for MT assembled by QTLaunchPad, and open-source tool building and training (MT Marathons). Coordination, communication and outreach to user communities is built upon existing networks and communication infrastructures such as the META-FORUM event series and strong involvement of industrial associations.
Funding: Horizon 2020 – CSA