Back to regular teaching!

This semester (SoSe-2025), I volunteered to offer a research seminar Quality in Human and Machine Translation (QH&MT) at the Language Science and Technology Department, University of Saarland. The seminar looks into the properties of MT, especially with regard to how it compares to human translation. It is designed to bring together the linguistic expertise on, and the technological aspects/issues of measuring, quality. We will look into (i) the theoretical pre-requisites of translation quality, (ii) compare approaches applied to humans and machines, and (iii) overview the best practices in manual as well as automatic quality annotation. The proposed research topics include linguistic studies based on comparative-contrastive analysis, developing TQ test sets, investigating existing metrics and designing new methods, tweaking MT and MT quality models to capture specific errors or address specified aspects of production. I invite computationally-minded linguists and NLP students who are curious whether today’s technology is a real competition to human translators, and what nuances there are to this comparison.

We start next Monday, 14 April 2025, at 16.15 (Gebäude C7 2 - Seminarraum -1.05).