TWO representatives from Hamad Bin Khalifa University gave presentations at this week’s Globalisation and Localisation Association (GALA 2017) conference in Amsterdam, an event organised by world’s leading trade association for the language industry.
Nada Melhem from Translation and Interpretation Institute (TII) and Majd Abbar (pictured) from Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI) presented their ideas at the event.
Melhem’s short talk, titled “Creating a Remote Interpreting Unit for Education City (Qatar)”, explored the rationale behind creation of such a unit, the challenges and difficulties faced during planning phase, the phases leading to pilot remote interpreting session, and what needs to be done to change mindset of interpreters and event organisers about effectiveness of remote interpreting compared to other traditional interpreting equipment.
Abbar’s presentation included full suite of advanced Arabic language technologies, specifically NLP, machine translation, segmentation, parsing, normalisation, diacritisation, speech recognition among others and some of the implementations in real-world solutions, and reliance on machine learning for all the technologies presented.
“QCRI is one of the top research institutes in the world dealing with Arabic language technologies, so I was pleased to showcase these technologies at the biggest language solutions conference,” Abbar said. “There was great interest in what was presented.”
