A multilingual framework for transforming online services to truly multilingual

Organic.Lingua Closing Workshop, 6/2/2014Rome, Italy

CIP ICT PSP – 270999

THE PROBLEM

Online discovery services: Agricultural domainwhy so few?

why so many options?why terminology is not correctly transformed?

can I search using terms in my language?

why terminology is not transformed correclty?

Discovery online services: other domains

why this is not synced with the language of user interface?

can I search using terms in my language?

why terminology is not correctly transformed?

Typical questions by online service owner

• which MT service should I use?• are there any free options?• what methodology should I follow

to translate my portal to a truly multilingual one?

• which open source tools should I use?

LESSONS LEARNED: THE ORGANIC.LINGUA EXPERIENCE

Lessons learned• Evaluate the performance of linguistic services

– users– in vitro

• MT has limitations and is not working well for a specific domain

• Inform the users for the MT• Provide generic components that can wrap different linguistic

services• Effort is needed to find, organize and prepare domain specific

language resources• Publish language resources that can be used to improve

linguistic services• Enable users feedback but control it

WHAT ORGANIC.LINGUA PROPOSES

Main contributions

• Methodology for the adaptation that can be re-used in different domains

• Open multilingual architecture• Re-engineering process• Open source software tools• Conceptual framework and linked data

approach

A common multilingual framework (CMF)

• What CMF is

• Principals– Open architecture based on REST APIs– Wrap language services– Decouple front end from back end– KOSs managed externally and published as linked

data

The Common Multilingual Framework (CMF) is intended to provide a set of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and a common architecture for digital collection portals that is neutral to the implementation technology of the portals and extensible

Who can be interested

• Portals with digital collections and specifically online content discovery services

• Projects that are re-engineering or developing such online content discovery services

• Other stakeholders– Digital collections managers– SMEs that want to develop products based on data– developers– software engineers and project managers– language technology experts

Architectural principals

• Domain agnostic• Open architecture

– any new component can be easily integrated• Adapt external services so you can easily

upgrade them• Keep analytics for the transactions with the

language services– important for the evaluation

How it look like

Open Source software

• Multilingual repository tool• Multilingual ontology evolution and publishing

tool• Analytics Service• Portal infrastructure

7 ways to become truly multilingual

1. Evaluate MT services before their and during their use

2. Manage KOSs externally and publish them as linked data

3. Be domain specific4. Sync content translation and

interface translation5. Wrap language services6. Follow the standards7. Get feedback from users