I’ve recently been able to meet some spectacular individuals who are working on various aspects of cross-language communication. This blog post won’t to justice to all of their work; so, please click to their websites and learn more.
- Irene Eleta Mogollon at the University of Maryland College of Information Studies (iSchool) and the Human-Computer Interaction Lab (HCIL). Her work has looked at multilingual social tagging of museums’ image collections and her PhD research is about multilingual communication on Twitter.
- Chris Salzberg Chris is working on a tool, Cojiro, for cross-language curation that allows users to collect references/content around a particular topic and translate the relevant/interesting parts of that content. He’s focusing in the Japanese–English space, but the tool
- John Dalton, a masters student at the Computer Science Department of the University of Oxford supervised by Phil Blunsom is completing fascinating research trying to develop an approach to identify human translations of content using techniques and theory from machine translation. I think this is a huge area of future research. If a (good) human translation of content has already been made, I would like Google Translate/Chrome to be able to identify that translation and recommend it to me in place of a machine translation. The work is also important to be able to develop corpora of more informal writing to improve the performance of machine translation algorithms on general web text.
- Clare Wardle is at Storyful, which works with professional news clients to identify and verify legitimate news “from the noise of the real-time web, 24/7”. A key part of identifying and verifying content deals with language issues.
- An Xiao, last but not least, is a design strategist, researcher, and
artist. She co-founded a Chinese-to-English Twitter translation site with nearly 10,000 followers and a dozen contributing members and also has some blog entries touching on cross-language issues such as this post noting similarities between topics trending in two different languages on Twitter.
Finally, a quick self-promotion (and thank you to those who voted!) to say that the Interactive Visualization project I blogged about earlier was successful in receiving funding and is plowing ahead. I hope to demo some very cool interactive visualizations very soon. We just need to get the final user-interface graphics into the demos.
