Oslo, 31 March 2020: Prof. Andy Way, Jane Dunne and Helen McHugh represented the ADAPT Centre at the 6 month, face-to-face partner meeting for the PRINCIPLE (Providing Resources in Irish, Norwegian, Croatian and Icelandic for Purposes of Language Engineering) project on the 26th and 27th of February in Oslo, Norway.
PRINCIPLE is a 2 year, Connecting Europe Facility (CEF)-funded project, whose main aim is to identify, collect and process high-quality Language Resources (LRs) for four under-resourced European languages: Croatian, Icelandic, Irish and Norwegian (Bokmål & Nynorsk). PRINCIPLE will deliver these high-quality curated LRs in order to improve translation quality in the Digital Service Infrastructures of eJustice and eProcurement via domain-specific Machine Translation (MT) systems.
The Oslo meeting was hosted by the National Library of Norway, with representatives from the 3 other consortium partners also in attendance: University of Iceland, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb and Iconic Translation Machines Ltd. It included sessions detailing progress to date, lessons learned from the first 6 months and future planning for the coming 6 months to ensure successful completion by the end of August 2021.
The project is progressing well with the data collection ramping up from ‘early adopters’: a number of national bodies and local stakeholders across Croatia, Iceland, Ireland and Norway who have agreed to provide LRs and who in return will benefit from a customised MT engine purpose-built by Iconic. The next face-to-face meeting for PRINCIPLE is expected to take place in Croatia towards the end of this year.
Some members of the consortium stayed longer in Oslo before and after the meeting to enjoy some of the many attractions that Oslo and Bergen has to offer such as skiing, the Viking ship museum, Nobel Prize museum, and the ‘Fram’ Amundsen Arctic/Antarctic museum. Given the lockdown we are now all experiencing, it was good to get out there and explore while we were able to!
Share this article:
