Nano Gough receives IBM global fellowship award
26 May 2003

DCU student of Computer Applications, Nano Gough, who was awarded an IBM scholarship on 11 April 2003, is pictured here with Emira Dautbegovic, an Electronic Engineering student, who also received received an IBM scholarship in April. DCU received the only two IBM scholarships that were allocated for Ireland.

Nano, like Emira, received a €15000 fellowship from IBM, a laptop and a three month internship. Andy Way, from the school of computing, is Nano's research supervisor.

Nano's research involves the development of an Example-based machine translation (EBMT) system. The concept behind EBMT is a relatively simple one. The fundamental idea is to generate new translations by means of a set of previously translated examples. Previous translations are used and the system learns from previous examples and can extract the necessary word translations to adapt a sentence. Initially, a bilingual aligned corpus is required. This corpus provides a lexical resource containing potentially reusable translations. Subsequent stages in the EBMT process involve matching new data against the existing corpus, retrieving 'similar' examples and their associated translations, and finally adapting and recombining these to produce a new translation.

This strengthens the relationship between DCU and IBM in the
area of Machine Translation, as IBM were one of the major sponsors at the recent conference on Controlled Translation
held at DCU, see link below.

Michael Daly, Country General Manager, IBM said that IBM has been involved in postgraduate research in DCU for a number of years and he also remarked that "It also further endorses both the quality and business relevance of the research being carried out in DCU."