Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya

The Technology University of Catalonia (UPC) imparts, among others, engineering degrees (Civil, Industrial, Electrical, Computer Science) and Mathematics and Statistics degrees. It is involved in research and technology transfer, with many quality doctoral programs, including: Artificial Intelligence, Applied Mathematics and Statistics. Starting September 2006, it started offering four new international masters degrees: Artificial Intelligence (with an intensification in Natural Language Processing), Applied Mathematics, Mathematical Engineering, and Statistics and Operations Research. For selected students, many double degrees in Mathematics and Engineering are possible with an additional year of studies. UPC also excels in the participation in research projects within the EC Framework programs, with extensive collaboration with other universities and private companies.

Two departments are involved: Applied Mathematics will contribute with personnel who were active in the developing of exercises and GF grammars in the scope of the WebALT project. The Natural Language Processing Research Group (GPLN) belongs to the Software Department in UPC and was founded in 1986. Ever since its creation, GPLN has worked on technologies and applications of automatic natural language processing. In the context of this project, GPLN investigates machine learning techniques for structure processing, syntactic–semantic linguistic analyzers for Statistical Machine Translation, and discriminative learning models for phrase selection in SMT. GPLN also has extensive experience in the evaluation of machine translation and has released the IQmt suite which provides a suite of MT metrics at several linguistic levels. Research activity in GPLN involves Spanish, Catalan, English, Arabic and Chinese languages. GPLN has participated in the following European projects on SMT: LC-STAR, FAME, TC-STAR-P and TC-STAR, and has taken part in the following international evaluations on MT systems: NIST (2008), IWSLT (2005-2008), WMT (2006-2009), TC-STAR (2006-2008), and MT metric evaluations: WMT (2007-2009), NIST MetricsMATR (2008).