Sign Language Machine Translation

About

Andy Way obtained a B.Sc. (Hons) in 1986 an M.Sc. in 1989 and his PhD in 2001 from the University of Essex Colchester U.K. From 1988-91 he worked at the University of Essex U.K. on the Eurotra MT project. He joined DCU in 1991 and is employed as Full Professor. He was the recipient of the 2015 DCU Presidents Research Award for Science and Engineering. In 2019 received the extremely prestigious Award of Honour from the International Association for Machine Translation for his services to the community. In 2023 he won the Engaged Research Award from Science Foundation Ireland for the SignOn project that he coordinated with Prof. Shterionov and on which Prof. Leeson was a PI. Prof. Way co-founded the SFI-funded Centre CNGL in 2007 and the ADAPT Centre in 2015. He took a career break from 2011- 2013 to work in the translation industry in the UK. On his return to DCU in Jan. 2014 Prof. Way acted as Deputy Director of CNGL and Deputy Director and Co-Applicant of ADAPT the 100 million SFI-funded Centre for Digital Content Technology until Dec. 2023. Prof. Way has been lead researcher on thirteen EU projects. Prof. Way served as President of the European Association for Machine Translation from 2009-2015 and was President of the International Association for Machine Translation from 201113. He was Editor of the Machine Translation journal from 200721. He is currently editing a series of books for Springer in the area of Machine Translation with four already published the current volume constituting the 5th and the final book under review. Andy has a h-index of 51 and over 10500 citations of his work. Lorraine Leeson holds a Dip. Deaf Studies (interpreting) M.Phil Linguistics PhD. Linguistics. Cert. Gender Studies. She is Professor in Deaf Studies at the Centre for Deaf Studies School of Linguistics Speech and Communication Sciences and Associate Dean of Research (Research Integrity) for Trinity College Dublin (2018-present). Prof Leeson has worked with Deaf communities in a range of capacities since 1990. She served as inaugural Director of the Centre for Deaf Studies at Trinity College Dublin from 2001-17. Her research work is multidisciplinary in nature. Her doctoral work was the first to examine aspects of the morphosyntax of Irish Sign Language and subsequent to this she has published widely on aspects of the grammar of Irish Sign Language as well as on applied linguistics topics including a significant body of work on sign language interpreting (16 books 58 papers 13 edited volumes (journals/monographs) and 100+ peer-reviewed conference papers. She was named a European Commission European Language Ambassador for her work on sign languages in 2008. Lorraine was a member of the first cohort of professionally trained Irish Sign Language/English interpreters in Ireland and she continues to interpret. She has engaged in pan-European research work with academic institutions Deaf communities and interpreting organisations since 1990 serving as Chair of the European Forum of Sign Language Interpreters Committee of Experts (2013-2019). She is a member of the Royal Irish Academys Committee on Languages Literatures and Cultures (LLC) (2018-present). Lorraine has a h-index of 21 and over 2000 citations of her work. Dimitar Shterionov is Assistant Professor in the School of Humanities and Digital Sciences Department Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence in Tilburg University The Netherlands. He is an experienced researcher in MT and NLP an expert in a plethora of subtopics of MT such as low-resource MT quality estimation automatic post-editing evaluation of MT quality and usability speech-to-text and text-to-speech translation etc. He also has experience with user-centred development of software solutions as well as cloud-based solutions to MT (e.g. at KantanMT). Dimitar obtained a PhD in computer science engineering from KU Leuven in 2015 on the topic of Probabilistic Logic and Learning. After that he moved to industry and joined KantanMT to work on their cloud-based customizable statistical MT system. In 2016 he was appointed headof research at KantanMT. His team developed the first cloud-based customizable and publically available neural MT solution released in early 2017. In November 2017 Dimitar joined the ADAPT team of Prof Andy Way as a post-doctoral researcher to work on industry-oriented MT and NLP projects. In January 2020 Dimitar assumed a position as an assistant professor in the School of Computing at DCU and soon after in August 2020 moved to take a new role as an assistant professor at the School of Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence in Tilburg. In his academic career Dimitar has published over 30 papers in national and international conference proceedings and journals. He has completed 4 large-scale and 5 small-scale projects. In the last 2 years Dimitars research has focused on Automatic Post-editing Quality Estimation MT for low-resource languages Lexical richness of MT and Cross-lingual Information Retrieval. He also actively participates in cross-field collaborations (e.g. in the medical arts and legal domains). Dimitar has a h-index of 15 and over 1300 citations of his work.