Machine Translation in Macau: Development and Research Challenges

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                Joint Seminar
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The Hong Kong University of Science & Technology
Human Language Technology Center
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering
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Speaker:        Dr. Derek Wong
                Department of Computer and Information Science
                Faculty of Science and Technology
                University of Macau

Title:          "Machine Translation in Macau: Development and Research
                 Challenges"

Date:           Thursday, 26 September 2013

Time:           2:30pm - 3:30pm

Venue:          Lecture Theater H (near lifts 27 & 28), HKUST

Abstract:

Macau has two official languages, Chinese and Portuguese, which are two of
the widely spoken languages. Although Chinese language is becoming more
important after the handover, one cannot overlook economic and diplomatic
relationships that Macau has forged with other Portuguese-speaking
countries with the use of the Portuguese language. The research on machine
translation (MT) for Chinese and Portuguese languages aims to seek for
solutions to improve the way how people communicate and deal with
information of different languages. The translation of Chinese and
Portuguese is complex and presents many challenges due to the various
syntactic varieties, and the fact that Chinese and Portuguese belong to
different language families. From research points of view, we are
interested in the properties of those languages and try to study how those
properties contribute to the development of an effective machine
translation model. In this seminar, we will give an overview of the
research activities at the Natural Language Processing &
Portuguese-Chinese Machine Translation Laboratory (NLP2CT), the University
of Macau. Our research is interdisciplinary and focuses on the development
of models and algorithms for knowledge representation and natural language
processing (NLP). The research topics include Portuguese-Chinese machine
translation, syntactic modeling, parsing, and machine learning in NLP.
Some developed systems will be demonstrated, and the major challenges in
the research will be discussed.


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Biography:

Derek F. Wong is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer and
Information Science, the University of Macau, where he is in charge of the
Natural Language Processing & Portuguese-Chinese Machine Translation
Laboratory (NLP2CT). He serves as the Program Leader of the Department of
Computer and Information Science at the University of Macau. Derek F. Wong
received the B.Sc. and M.Sc. Degrees in Software Engineering from the
University of Macau in 1995 and 1999, and Ph.D. degree in Automation from
Tsinghua University in 2005. During 2008 ~ 2011, he has been holding a
secondary appointment as a project leader and research fellow in the
Instituto de Engenharia de Sistemas e Computadores de Macau (INESC-Macau).
He has led several funded research projects as the PI, Co-PI and Project
Leader. He received the Second-class prize in the Science and Technology
Progress Award, Macao Science and Technology Award in 2012. His active and
diverse research interests span areas of natural language processing,
machine translation and machine learning to NLP.