Machine Translation for Microblogs

Sponsored by: FCT (CMUP-EPB/TIC/0026/2013)
Start: January 2015
End: December 2015

INESC-ID Team

PI: Isabel Trancoso

• João Paulo Carvalho
• Wang Ling
• Anabela Barreiro
• Luís Marujo

UNBABEL TEAM

• João Graça

Carnegie Mellon University Team

• Chris Dyer
• Alan Black

Summary

The MT4M project develops machine translation systems for content in microblogs, such as Twitter. This domain is characterized by creative use of language, dialectal lexemes, and informal register, which challenge traditional systems. For example, Google's English-Portuguese translation system translates the English sentence "ill cook it brotha!" (an informal variant of "I'll cook it, brother!" which the same translation system effectively translates) into the completely unintelligible "doente cozinhar brotha!" (roughly: "sick to cook brotha!"). The work on this project involves the development of a tweet normalizer that is capable of converting non-standard text into a standard text while preserving the meaning of the original tweet.