GoURMET ("Global Under-Resourced Media Translation",
https://gourmet-project.eu/) is a Horizon 2020 action funded by the European Commission. The coordinating partner is the University of Edinburgh. Two research partners (Universitat d'Alacant and Universiteit van Amsterdam) and two key media partners (BBC and Deutsche Welle) complete the consortium.
Machine translation is an increasingly vital technology for a global and interconnected world. However,
while it works very well in situations where there are millions of translated sentences for training models, for low-resourced language pairs (this is the list of languages tackled in GoURMET), the quality of translation makes it barely, if at all, usable.
GouRMET focusses on both collecting and creating low-resource language data, and also pushing forward the latest research in machine learning to be able to make the best use of the little data available.
The media industry is one of the pillars of a functioning democracy, and it is increasingly under a range of threats such as political populism and social media content aggregators. Our project will help the media industry to thrive by allowing them to reach a bigger audience with less effort. Our translation models will allow journalists to understand a broad spread of news from countries of interest, and also to produce content faster in local languages by leveraging the output of machine translation models.
GoURMET has three main goals
1. Advancing low-resource deep learning for natural language applications
2. Development of high-quality machine translation for low-resource language pairs and domains
3. Development of tools for media analysts and journalists.
