The researcher and winner of the 2007 LRC Best Scholar Award is Asgeir Frimannsson for his proposal Cross-domain Translation Reuse in Community-driven Localisation of Software and E-Content. His research will be supervised by Prof James Hogan of the School of Software Engineering and Data Communications Queensland University of Technology, Australia.

Excerpt from proposal
In the localisation of software and e-content, the reuse of translated content is only effective if the proposed segment matches are of a high quality and of a similar contextual domain to the content being translated. If this is not the case, the time spent evaluating TM matches is often not worth the effort, as the matches are often inappropriate translations of the content. These constraints have up until now limited the cross-domain reuse of translation memories. In addition, legal concerns – in particular the protection of intellectual property – have limited the possibilities of sharing translation memories amongst commercial localisation vendors and translators. In community-driven translation, however, the concerns over intellectual property are not dominant, as the idea of sharing for mutual benefit is very much the nature of these open source initiatives. 

In this research we aim to develop a method for successful cross-domain sharing of translation memories across community-driven localisation initiatives. The research questions primarily concern automated approaches to context aware matching and resource quality management. We will investigate a number of existing automated approaches to categorizing content, with a special emphasis on semantic topic modelling approaches such as Latent Dirichlet Allocation and Latent Semantic Analysis, and evaluate these methods against more traditional IR and discriminative approaches. In the study of quality management of community-driven localisation resources, we will investigate approaches used in other domains such as file sharing, and also investigate how Cross Language Information Retrieval approaches can be of use to the problem of filtering out low quality translations in translation matching of resources from across community-driven localisation initiatives

The winner of the 207 Best Thesis Award attempts to to systematically identify and study in-depth the challenges and the key issues that have an impact on the experience of people using online MT services to translate web-based text and manage multilingual information on the internet. The perspectives of interlingual dissemination and assimilation of digital information are both considered, to address the key challenges of using MT in the online environment. Adopting a language-neutral and system-independent approach, the thesis examines a range of under-researched questions regarding the successful deployment of web-based MT software in a number of scenarios with a view to raising the profile of MT on the internet.

The title of the eleventh Annual 2007 LRC Best Thesis is The Role of Online MT in Webpage Translation, a thesis submitted to The University of Manchester for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Humanities, under the supervision of Prof Harold Somers.