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I took up my current (half-time) post at DCU in February 2008, having taken early retirement after 30 years at the University of Manchester and its
predecessor institution UMIST.
My main activity is as Director of Outreach and Education.
I will also be continuing my research as part of the
MT research group, in particular as Workpackage leader on the "Assistive Technology"
track of the Integrated Language Technology theme.
My first degree, from University College North Wales, Bangor, was in Linguistics and I have
an MA in Linguistics from Manchester University and a PhD from UMIST.
I came to UMIST in 1978 as a Teaching Assistant
in the (then) Department of European Studies and Modern Languages, working
my way through the ranks - and the name changes - eventually to become
in August 2000, Head of the Department of Language and Linguistics.
During my time at UMIST
I helped to set up, and later was Director of, the Centre for Computational
Linguistics. Between 2000 and 2004 I oversaw the dismantling of that department in the run up to the
amalgamation of UMIST with Manchester University, at which
time I transferred first to the School of Informatics, then the School of Languages, Linguistics and Cultures.
On retirement I was granted the title of Emeritus professor in the School of Computer Science.
I have had three breaks on leave of absence, at ISSCO in Geneva in 1979-80,
as a Toshiba Fellow in
Japan in 1986-7, and between January and September 2005
at the Centre for Language
Technology, Macquarie University, Sydney.
Throughout the course of my career, my main interest has focused on all aspects of Machine Translation and
related technologies, especially, recently, applications in areas of healthcare provision, where it can be
used to help patients with limited or no English. I am especially interested in healthcare as an application area
for spoken language translation, and have presented papers (e.g. this one,
at TMI 2007) exploring the range of technologies needed for this purpose. Further research is planned, focussing
on languages relevant to new immigrants in Ireland, and also on Irish Sign Language.
Project
We have been successful in the recent FP7 round of project proposals, and will participate in the CoSyne project, which aims
to integrate translation, editing and updating of multilingual wiki sites. More than just tranlsation, the idea is
that user's updates might include new information and/or postedits of imperfect translations, and might be made to any of
several parallel versions of the wiki page. It is then up to the system to reconcile these edits, making sure never to
retranslate something that has been written or corrected by a human; the system also has a knowledge engineering aspect as it
tests for consistency of information.
Supervision:
During my Manchester years I supervised 17 successful PhD students (with two more
just submitted, and one other in process) - See
here for details.
I am or will be supervising the following students at DCU:
- Sara Morrissey (Post-doc) Translation of and into sign languages for Deaf people
- Sandipan Dandapat (PhD) Mitigating problems in statistical machine translation with propositional analogy
- Robert Smith (PhD) Animations from transcriptions for sign language synthesis
My current post does not involve any teaching. Almost all my teaching in the past was focussed on Machine Translation,
though I have also taught programming (Pascal, Lisp, Prolog), general computational linguistics courses,
corpus linguistics, and other more general linguistics topics, and study skills.
I am external examiner for the MAs in Applied Translation Studies, Interpreting and Translation Studies, and Translation Studies
with Interpreting in the School of Modern Languages, University of Leeds.
Previously, I have been external examiner for UG courses at the University of Brighton.
I have been (or am about to be) the external examiner for PhDs (or equivalent) at the following universities:
Alicante, Basel, Coventry, Dublin City University, Essex, Geneva, Imperial College London, Jadavpur University Kolkata, Lancaster,
Leeds, Macquarie University Sydney, Manchester, Montreal, Sheffield, Trinity College Dublin.
I was from 1996 to 2007 editor of the journal
Machine
Translation published by Springer. Andy Way
took over the editorship in 2008. I remain on the editorial board.
I am on the Editorial Board of the journal
Localisation Focus,
and of the ACL's Studies in Natural Language Processing
book series, published by Cambridge University Press.
I was Chairman of the local arrangements committee for Coling 2008, which took place in Manchester.
From 2004 to 2008 I was a member of the Executive Committee of the European Association for MT (EAMT).
I have been a member of the Advisory Committee of the European
Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, which I helped
found in 1982 and of which I was secretary from 1982-86.
Activities in which I am involved, in the near future
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EBMT Workshop
Dublin |
2nd AILO
Ireland |
- 12-13 November: I will present a paper entitled "A review of EBMT using proportional analogies" at the 3rd Workshop on Example-Based Machine Translation, to be held at DCU, Dublin
- January-March 2010: We are organizing the Second All Ireland Linguistics Olympiad, with a national final in Dublin.
Activities in the last twelve months
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FP7 LT Days
Luxembourg |
FLaReNet
Vienna |
AILO 2009
Ireland |
EAMT 2009
Barcelona |
CNGL Spring meeting
Dublin |
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5th Corp Ling Conf
Liverpool |
ILO 2009
Wrocław, Poland |
ISA Cloud Computing Bootcamp
Dublin |
CNGL biannual meeting
Dublin |
"Linguistics at School"
Cambridge |
January: I attended the EC's FP7 Language Technology Days in Luxembourg.
February: I participated in the FLaReNet Launching (sic) Event in Vienna.
February: I attended the Spring 2009 Scientific Meeting of the Centre for Next Generation Localisation, at Dublin City University.
April: We organized the first All Ireland Linguistics Olympiad, with a national final in Dublin.
May: I was programme co-chair for the 13th Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation, held in Barcelona.
