Transforming an online service to truly multilingual

1. CIP ICT PSP – 270999
A multilingual framework for transforming
online services to truly multilingual
Organic.Lingua Closing Workshop, 6/2/2014
Rome, Italy

2. THE PROBLEM

3. Online discovery services: Agricultural domain
why so few?
can I search using terms in
my language?
why terminology is not transformed correclty?
why so many options?
why terminology is not correctly transformed?

4. Discovery online services: other domains
can I search using terms in
my language?
why terminology is not correctly transformed?
why this is not synced with the language of user
interface?

5. Typical questions by online service
owner
• which MT service should I use?
• are there any free options?
• what methodology should I follow
to translate my portal to a truly
multilingual one?
• which open source tools should I
use?

6. LESSONS LEARNED: THE
ORGANIC.LINGUA EXPERIENCE

7. Lessons learned
• Evaluate the performance of linguistic services
– users
– in vitro
• MT has limitations and is not working well for a specific
domain
• Inform the users for the MT
• Provide generic components that can wrap different linguistic
services
• Effort is needed to find, organize and prepare domain specific
language resources
• Publish language resources that can be used to improve
linguistic services
• Enable users feedback but control it

8. WHAT ORGANIC.LINGUA PROPOSES

9. Main contributions
• Methodology for the adaptation that can be
re-used in different domains
• Open multilingual architecture
• Re-engineering process
• Open source software tools
• Conceptual framework and linked data
approach

10. A common multilingual framework
(CMF)
• What CMF is
The Common Multilingual Framework (CMF) is intended to provide a set of
Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and a common architecture for digital
collection portals that is neutral to the implementation technology of the portals
and extensible
• Principals
–
–
–
–
Open architecture based on REST APIs
Wrap language services
Decouple front end from back end
KOSs managed externally and published as linked
data

11. Who can be interested
• Portals with digital collections and specifically
online content discovery services
• Projects that are re-engineering or developing
such online content discovery services
• Other stakeholders
–
–
–
–
–
Digital collections managers
SMEs that want to develop products based on data
developers
software engineers and project managers
language technology experts

12. Architectural principals
• Domain agnostic
• Open architecture
– any new component can be easily integrated
• Adapt external services so you can easily
upgrade them
• Keep analytics for the transactions with the
language services
– important for the evaluation

13. How it look like

14. Open Source software
• Multilingual repository tool
• Multilingual ontology evolution and publishing
tool
• Analytics Service
• Portal infrastructure

15. 7 ways to become truly multilingual
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
Evaluate MT services before their
and during their use
Manage KOSs externally and publish
them as linked data
Be domain specific
Sync content translation and
interface translation
Wrap language services
Follow the standards
Get feedback from users