About
More than half of the EU citizens are not able to hold a conversation in a language other than their mother tongue, let alone to conduct a negotiation, or interpret a law. In a time of wide availability of communication technologies, language barriers are a serious bottleneck to European integration and to economic and cultural exchanges in general. More effective tools to overcome such barriers, in the form of software for machine translation and other cross-lingual textual information access tasks, are in strong demand.
Statistical methods are promising, in that they achieve performances equivalent or superior to those of rule-based systems, at a fraction of the development effort. There are, however, some identified shortcomings in these methods, preventing their broad diffusion. As an example, even though lexical choice is usually more accurate with Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) systems than with their rule-based counterparts, the text they produce tends to be less fluent. As a second example, SMT systems are trained in batch mode and do not adapt by taking user feedback into account. Finally, in Cross-Language Information Retrieval tasks, query words are most often translated independent of one another, thus giving up possibly relevant contextual clues.
SMART is an attempt to address these and other shortcomings by the methods of modern Statistical Learning. The scientific focus is on developing new and more effective statistical approaches while ensuring that existing know-how is duly taken into account. By bringing together leading research institutions in Statistical Learning, Machine Translation and Textual Information Access, the SMART consortium is well positioned to achieve this goal.
Videos
Introduction

SMART Workshop: Welcome and programme
Feb 25, 2007
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3465 views
Lectures

Kernel Methods in Statistical Learning
Feb 25, 2007
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8331 views

MATRAX
Feb 25, 2007
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3156 views
Language Modelling
Feb 25, 2007
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4680 views

The WikiPedia
Feb 25, 2007
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4944 views

Evaluation of MT and CLITIA
Feb 25, 2007
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5159 views

The Work of a Professional Translator
Feb 25, 2007
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7497 views

Operations at a Techinical Call Centre
Feb 25, 2007
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3311 views

Learning with Structured Output
Feb 25, 2007
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4506 views

Text Garden
Feb 25, 2007
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5815 views

Kernel Methods in Statistical Learning
Feb 25, 2007
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14473 views

Statistical Machine Translation
Feb 25, 2007
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8400 views

Thoughts on Language Models in Machine Translation
Feb 25, 2007
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4946 views

Learning with Structured Output
Feb 25, 2007
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6038 views

Cross-Language Information Access
Feb 25, 2007
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3086 views

Trans Lab
Feb 25, 2007
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4146 views

On-line Statistical Learning
Feb 25, 2007
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5636 views