Modern language experts at the University of Leeds are developing computer programs which could alter how languages are taught and used around the world.
Currently, many computer-based systems for teaching and
translating languages are out of date or not user-friendly. While there is a
wealth of information about different languages and vocabularies available on
the internet, much is badly-organised and difficult to navigate.
Dr Serge Sharoff of the Centre for Translation Studies is
working on three research projects - Kelly, TTC and Accurat - to bring things
up to date. He has been awarded close to £700,000 from the European Commission
in recent months to fund the work.
In the Kelly project, a set of word learning cards for
some of the most frequent words in Swedish, Norwegian, Greek, Polish, Arabic,
English, Chinese, Russian and Italian will be developed, along with a
scientific basis for measuring learners' abilities in these languages.
According to Sharoff, some language teachers are unhappy
with the word learning cards currently available because of inconsistencies in
grading. The Kelly project is designed to produce word lists from large
collections of data and adapt them into a new, learner-centred framework.
Dr Sharoff said: "Flashcards are useful for language
learners but need to be graded in terms of difficulty. This grading exists but
hasn't been done rigorously until now. Words will be classified individually
and by 15 subject categories - such as food and drink, nature and animals -
into a visual scheme. This will allow learners and teachers to deal with words
systematically, by setting clear aims, planning studies and controlling
progress."
TTC (Terminology Extraction, Translation Tools and
Comparable Corpora) aims to provide new tools for translators by producing
up-to-date term lists from original texts in French, German, Spanish, Chinese
and Russian for rapidly developing areas, such as wind energy or mobile phones.
This will be done by taking a variety of different methods utilising a large
amount of original texts in these languages. Such term banks can be used for
translation, including, including machine translation - using computer software
to translate speech or text from one language to another - and
computer-assisted translation tools - translators using computers to assist in
their work - with multilingual content management tools.
The third project, Accurat, will research new methods and
techniques to overcome one of the main problems of machine translation - the
lack of linguistic resources for languages which are relatively
under-represented on computers, such as Latvian, Estonian, Romanian, Greek and
Croatian.
Dr Sharoff said: "The main goal is to find and evaluate
new ways to exploit the properties of independently written texts in some
languages in order to compensate for the shortage of translation resources in
others between them. Ultimately, this is to improve translation tools for languages
that are currently poorly-served."
For more information contact:
Guy Dixon, University of Leeds media relations - 0113 343
8299 or g.dixon@leeds.ac.uk
Notes to editors
The 2008 Research Assessment Exercise showed the
University of Leeds to be the UK's eighth biggest research powerhouse. The
University is one of the largest higher education institutions in the UK and a
member of the Russell Group of research-intensive universities. The
University's vision is to secure a place among the world's top 50 by 2015.
www.leeds.ac.uk
In the most recent national review of research quality
(RAE2008) CTS@Leeds researchers were assessed together with colleagues in
Computer Science and Informatics. The review concluded that 80% of the research
outputs were 'world leading' or 'internationally excellent', while the
remaining 20% were 'internationally recognised' - these being the top three
grades on a five-grade scale.