Multilingual Information Service System for the Beijing Olympics, a Playground of MT Technologies

Multilingual Information Service System for the Beijing Olympics, a playground of MT technologies Weiquan LIU Beijing Network and Multimedia Laboratory 6th JBXXG, No. 3 Yumin East Rd. Beijing, China, 100029 liuweiquan@capinfo.com.cn Abstract This paper introduces the Multilingual Information Service System being implemented for the Beijing Olympics. Multilingual machine translation is an important component in this system. This real world application asks for advanced as well as mature and proven technologies, where MT is challenged. However, by appropriately choosing domain and scenario, current MT technologies are successfully integrated in the pilot system. Future applications ask MT to have better performance in readability, lexicon coverage and more efficient. Multilinguality support and fast language adaptation is highly desired by such real world systems. 1 Introduction The XXIX Olympic Games is going to be held in Beijing, 2008. Both the municipal and the Beijing Olympic Organizing Committee (BOCOG) are working intensively to make sure this game is a successful and outstanding one. In the 2nd half of 2001, shortly after Beijing won the rights to host this game, they issued the “Action Plan for the Olympic Games”, in which the difficulties in languages are addressed. In this action plan, realizing the language barrier is a major issue to hinder people from effective communication, the organizers promise “…to ensure that any body at any time and in any place can enjoy the information service that is affordable, comprehensive, personalized and multilingual…” It’s estimated that 600 thousands foreign spectators will come to Beijing during the game time, they could come from any nation and speak many kinds of languages. Though Chinese, English and French are appointed as the working languages, but in terms of more than 120 national delegations, it’s not enough to cover all their native tongues. People will meet difficulties when acquiring and exchanging information using different languages. Especially in China, where Mandarin is predominant, English speaking people is rare, let alone other foreign languages. Since 2002, supported by the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology, the Beijing Municipal government and BOCOG, partners from industry and academic conducted a serial of pilot studies on developing a multilingual information service system for the Olympics. The goals are to use the latest, as well as mature and proven technologies to help the Olympic participants overcome the language problem. Encouraged by the achievements of these research activities, BOCOG initiated the “Multilingual Information Service System” project in April 2005. The system will provide Olympic participants multilingual information on both the city and the games, in order to eliminate their dread feeling caused by unknown languages and help them enjoy the games better. This paper serves to introduce the previous work done and the system kicked off by BOCOG which is still in planning phase when this paper is written. 2 The requirements and functional specifications BOCOG organized the user requirement analysis as the first step towards implementing the system. The focus is on the following issues: user population distribution, the languages to cover, the catalog of information that …

Content truncated to 500 words