Success stories of the Language Technology platform for public administration – hugo.lv and the EU presidency e-translation tool

Machine Translation
11.12.2018
Arturs Vasilevskis CEF

Tilde has been successfully contributing to translation solutions by developing the translation tool for the EU Council presidency and the language technology platform hugo.lv. By this e-governance solutions are made available to a broader public. Success stories have aroused a lot of interest from stakeholders across the EU.

The first Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) eTranslation Conference took place on November 29-30 in Brussels. As it was the first eTranslation conference, it attracted lots of interest from leading academicians, language technology experts, the European Commission and LT technology service providers.

On the first day, Artūrs Vasiļevskis, Head of Tilde MT solutions, gave an insight on how eTranslation can be used in a particular domain. Tilde shared advantages of the EU Council Presidency translation tool and provided valuable insights into the development of the custom Neural Networks’ MT system. The Neural MT system developed by Tilde and used for the EU Council presidency showed outstanding results by winning two consecutive “MT Olympics” (in 2017 and 2018). It was quite a challenge to develop a state-of-the-art winning technology and provide multilingual information to delegates, journalists and other visitors from 28 EU countries and beyond. In spite of obstacles, Tilde, by using a number of highly innovative technologies, such as cross-lingual search, interactive machine translation or named entity recognition, managed to provide users with a system with the eTranslation services in it.

Furthermore, Tilde has been actively involved in the development of eTranslation, contributing to the technical improvements of the platform.

On the second day of the conference, Artūrs Vasiļevskis and Jānis Ziediņš (from the Culture Information Systems Centre of Latvia) shared the success story of making public institutions work more efficiently for citizens and foreign visitors. To help overcome barriers in accessing public services, Tilde in cooperation with the Culture Information Systems Centre of Latvia, a leading partner from the public administration, developed the language technology platform Hugo.lv. The supported services of the platform include MT and also an online CAT tool, speech recognition, text-to-speech analysis and a terminology portal. Based on the above tools, Latvian government enables e-governance work for general public. Conference attendees eagerly followed the presentation of both success cases. 

About the conference: the first CEF eTranslation Conference aims to showcase how CEF eTranslation tools help public services to use multilingualism as an advantage and to prepare better services.