I was in Dublin recently.

11 Feb. 2010

As the title says, I was in Dublin recently. I loved it. Especially the pickled onion snacks.

Fourth Annual Machine Translation Conference

I was at the conference with Johns Hopkins to meet other machine translation researchers and share ideas / code. There was heavy focus on the open sourced work available to other researchers. WikiTrans is open source. WikiTrans.org will be up soon too, so everyone can try the work. It has support for multiple translation engines now too! I will be blogging the progress at the WikiTrans blog soon.

Dublin itself was a treat. My Grandpa went to Trinity College, which is right in the city. I was staying in Lower Dublin and taking buses to University City of Dublin (UCD). There is also a Dublin City University (DCU), and to keep things confusing they refer to Trinity as TCD.

Anyway.

WikiTrans

As I said, I'll be covering what changed with WikiTrans while I was there, but I'd like to sum it up here anyway. We now have support for three translation engines: Moses, Apertium and Google Translate. There is also full support for Mechanical Turk translation tasks. Also, the ability to approve / reject sentence translations. We also have an improved interface to Wikipedia that also improves our sentence segmentation. A team member also improved the sentence segmentation found in NLTK's Punkt by training it on Korean, Icelandic, Russian and Hungarian.

Totally stoked on all of the work that's been done and on my new friends. Check the blog for more details.

Ireland

Driving around Ireland was great. Made some new friends in Waterford, kissed the Blarney and got confused driving around Dublin. Their streets are a mess of one-ways. They make up for it with everyone being so friendly and eager to chat.

And, interestingly, the local band we saw in Waterford was awesome. I asked around to see if the quality of the band, being made of locals, was typical and people said no. But we had a really great night anyway.