Prof Andy Way

Email Address: [email protected]

Prof. Way obtained a B.Sc. (Hons) in 1986, an M.Sc. in 1989, and his PhD in 2001 from the University of Essex, Colchester, U.K. From 1988-91 he worked at the University of Essex, U.K., on the Eurotra Machine Translation (MT) project. He joined DCU in 1991, and is employed as Full Professor. He was the recipient of the 2015 DCU President’s Research Award for Science and Engineering, and in 2019, received the extremely prestigious Award of Honour from the International Association for Machine Translation (IAMT) for his services to the community. In 2023, the SFI Engaged Research Award recognised his coordination of the SignON project (https://signon-project.eu).

Prof. Way co-founded the SFI-funded Centre for Next Generation Localisation (CNGL) in December 2007. In the summer of 2011 he took a career break until the end of 2013 to work in the translation industry in the UK. On his return to DCU in Jan. 2014, Prof. Way acted as Deputy Director of CNGL, and subsequently Deputy Director and Co-Founder of ADAPT, the €100 million SFI-funded Centre for Digital Content Technology. He stepped back from this role in Dec. 2023, but remains Principal Investigator in the Centre.

Prof. Way has secured grants totalling over €100 million, with over €15 million directly for his own research. He has been lead researcher on 17 EU projects bringing in over €30M, with over €4M to DCU. Prof. Way served as President of the European Association for Machine Translation from 2009-2015, and was President of the IAMT from 2011–13. He was Editor of the Machine Translation journal from 2007–21.

Prof. Way has published over 450 peer-reviewed papers (cf. https://www.computing.dcu.ie/~away/pubs.html), and is acknowledged as the leading publisher worldwide in Scopus-linked journals and conferences in the area of MT. As of March 2024 he has a Google Scholar h-index of 50, an i-10 index of 254, and over 10,100 citations for his research (cf. https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=YLwnsbUAAAAJ&hl=en). He has successfully graduated 32 PhD students, five of whom have won Best Thesis Awards, and 11 M.Sc. students (cf. https://www.computing.dcu.ie/~away/alumni.html). Prof. Way’s research interests include all areas of MT: statistical MT, example-based MT, neural MT, rule-based MT, hybrid models of MT, MT evaluation, teaching MT, etc. Prof. Way has organised a number of leading conferences in Dublin, including COLING 2014 (over 800 participants), MT Summit 2019 (over 400 participants), and ACL 2022 (over 3500 participants). Andy has acted as Track Chair in the top-ranked conferences, inc. COLING, ACL, EMNLP, EACL, NAACL etc., and has examined PhD students at the world’s leading universities.

He is currently editing a series of six books for Springer in the area of MT (https://www.springer.com/series/15798), with four already published, and a fifth entitled Sign Language Machine Translation (https://link.springer.com/book/9783031473616) which Andy co-edited himself to appear very shortly. In 2023, Prof. Way co-edited the book European Language Equality (https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-28819-7) which ranks in the top-10 most downloaded titles on Springer’s site, and co-edited Computer-Assisted Literary Translation (https://www.routledge.com/Computer-Assisted-Literary-Translation/Rothwell-Way-Youdale/p/book/9781032413006). A text book entitled Automating Translation (https://www.routledge.com/Automating-Translation/Moorkens-Way-Lankford/p/book/9781032436807) that Andy co-wrote will appear in August 2024, and Andy is co-editing a book on Efficient Natural Language Processing which should also appear this year.

Research Domains
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Languages
  • Linguistics
  • Machine Learning
  • Machine Translation
  • Natural Language Processing

Publications