Finnish-Swedish machine translation challenge

We organize a special course on language technology, each year with a different topic. Now the topic was Finnish-Swedish machine translation. The student groups were given the challenge to build during the fall a working prototype of a MT system. Two groups built a hybrid system and one fully statistical system. The statistical system got the best BLEU scores but with very small margin to the second group. There were also differences in the experience level among the participants in the area of MT. Mathias Creutz (on the right) announced the evaluation results.

It was concluded that the general level of the results was good, especially taking into account the short time the groups had available for the whole project. Many problems remained, of course, but the students told that they got good hands-on experience on the theme.

Participants of the Finnish-Swedish Machine Translation Challenge.

The course was organized by the Laboratory of Computer and Information Science in collaboration with the Department of Translation Studies at University of Helsinki and the Department of General Linguistics at University of Helsinki. The students were able to use the resources and tools provided by the Finnish IT center for science, CSC.