Projects on Machine Translation (MT) modelling, MT training data scarcity and human factors are pivotal to extending research in MT, human translation and their business impact.
New deep learning techniques are being augmented with linguistic knowledge to constrain the MT decoding space explosion due to increasing model complexity. Cloud-based models seed MT engines built on-the-fly using small amounts of data targeted to the translational requirements of the input document. We extend our previous research on domain adaptation to new ADAPT sectors and data types using grounding semantics, filtering out ‘noisy’ input, and where data is in short supply, supplement parallel training data with comparable corpora. We also extend our previous ethnographic studies of real users of MT output, which will uncover cognitive and social barriers to MT acceptability. Novel evaluation schemes are being developed which meet industry needs for flexible, configurable quality measures that reflect directly their core organisational goals.