GoURMET at the BBC Newshack

Several GoURMET project members came together to form a team at the BBC Newshack event in London (11-12 June 2019). The hackathon with over 40 professionals from the fields of language technology and journalism (including the Financial Times, Deutsche Welle, The BBC, academic institutions including the University of Edinburgh and a number of startups) was organised to develop new ideas related to multilingual news stories. 

The GoURMET team’s idea, named UpBeat, is an automatic post-editing system designed to improve machine translation for the re-versioning of multilingual news stories by journalists. Its focus is on using the journalists’ knowledge to update the post-editing system, so that they avoid correcting the same mistakes time and time again. 

To ensure minimal change to the journalists’ current workflow, the system infers which translations have been corrected by automatically comparing the original translation and the journalist’s re-versioned text. These corrections are stored in topic-dependent glossaries, updated after each re-versioned story has been submitted in order to improve the machine translation of future stories. 

You are also interested in what the other teams came up with? Go to “Roundup of the multilingual #Newshack” on BBC Newslabs.