A new MLLP research project, “MORE: Multilingual Open Resources for Education” (2016–2018), has been selected by the Spanish government for funding under the 2015 Research Challenges call of the Societal Challenges R&D&I Programme 2013–2016.
Universitat Politècnica de València’s MLLP (Machine Learning and Language Processing) research group has been for years leading research and innovation projects at the EU and Spanish levels. Spain’s Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness has now selected the MLLP’s 3-year “MORE: Multingual Open Resources for Education” (2016–2018) for funding under the 2015 Research Challenges call of the Societal Challenges R&D&I Programme 2013–2016.
This project aims to dramatically foster Open Education by providing multilingual access to Open Educational Resources (OER) and by enabling multilingual online communication in MOOC platforms. These two general purposes can be achieved by using a combination of transdisciplinary tools: automatic speech recognition (ASR), speech synthesis (Text-To Speech, TTS), statistical machine translation (SMT) and dialogue. By using ASR, TTS and SMT, multilingual access to OER will be possible for everyone regardless of their mother tongue or learning abilities. By adapting SMT models to the specific structure of dialogues in discussion forums, learners will be enabled to conduct cross-lingual conversations. Additionally, by adapting the cross-lingual dialogue tools thus developed, an ambitious automatic virtual educator will provide academic assistance to learners, increasing feedback from the system.
The tools developed will be integrated into Opencast and Open edX, with the aim of evaluating them on real-life data and settings, and ensuring that these innovative solutions will rapidly spread over many OER and MOOC providers worldwide.
The MLLP is excited to start working on MORE along with their other current projects, which include the EU project EMMA and technology transfer contracts with the Translation Centre for the Bodies of the European Union (CdT) and the Carlos III University of Madrid (UC3M), in addition to the provision of automatic multilingual video subtitling services to the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV). Be sure to visit our Projects section to read more about MORE and other MLLP projects, current and past.