This Partnership for International Research and Education (PIRE) links senior and junior researchers from Johns Hopkins University and Brown University with counterparts from Charles University in the Czech Republic and Saarland University in Germany. The international team, led by Frederick Jelinek at Johns Hopkins, will investigate formal representations of linguistic meaning for use in speech recognition/reconstruction and machine translation (MT) systems. Their goal is to augment current speech recognition systems by applying a variety of formal models for deep syntactic/semantic representation so that output of their refined MT system becomes coherent, grammatical text.
The projects complementary education component involves introducing participating U.S. graduate students to European-developed linguistic formalisms and training them to apply those formalisms to problems in natural language processing. Students will have language training in Czech or German and will spend at least one semester abroad where they will further their linguistic training in tectogrammatical representation at Charles University or head-driven phrase structure grammar at Saarland University. In the final stages of their Ph.D. program, each will return to the Czech Republic or Germany to work with European mentors on research that incorporates these state-of-the art language processing techniques.
Results from the collaborative research, annual workshops and cross-training should advance the field of computational linguistics by integrating formal meaning representations and statistical methods for natural language processing so that modern computer resources can be exploited to more rapidly translate verbal communications from other languages into English. If successful, this work could revolutionize language modeling for automatic speech recognition so that even spontaneous speech may be translated into fluent, reconstructed text that efficiently captures the intended meaning of the original.
This interdisciplinary PIRE in computational linguistics fulfills the program objective of advancing scientific knowledge by enabling experts in the United States and Europe to combine complementary talents and share research resources in areas of strong mutual interest and competence. Broader impacts include early career introduction of U.S. graduate students to an international professional network of leading linguists, computational theorists, and experts in human language technology.
