EuroMatrixPlus

During its three-year term, EuroMatrixPlus has had impressive and significant impact on the development of the field of machine translation (MT) in Europe, and also world-wide. A successor to the well-known successful EuroMatrix project, in which MT systems for a wide range of European language pairs were built, EuroMatrixPlus went from March 2009 until April 2012 (38 months) with a budget of 5.94 MEUR, funded by the European Commission’s Seventh Framework Programme under contract 231720. The project was coordinated by DFKI, the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, with its Language Technology Lab in Saarbrücken. Hans Uszkoreit was the principal investigator and scientific coordinator.
The project’s focus was on “bringing MT to the user”. The open-source system Moses, the SMT toolkit most widely adopted not only by academia but also by the translation industry, was further developed by the project. In addition to cutting-edge research in SMT and hybrid approaches to MT, in which rule-based and statistical components are combined in various ways to benefit from the strengths of both approaches, the project has organized several “MT Marathons” and continued the annual evaluation campaigns with shared tasks on burning issues, all widely recognized by the field. The organization of specialized workshops with industrial users, the release of resources and software and a total of 196 scientific publications complement the success story of EuroMatrixPlus.