DCU Researchers have developed an app providing live translations of tweets relating to the 2014 FIFA World Cup.
“Brazilator” was created in collaboration with Microsoft Research and instantly translates tweets from 12 languages into English, allowing users to follow what supporters in 24 of the original 32 competing countries are saying on social media site Twitter.
The languages include Irish, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Croatian, Greek, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Farsi. Tweets in English can also be translated into any of the other 12 languages.
Tracking hashtags like #WorldCup and #WC2014, Brazilator provides users with relevant messages on the tournament. The service can also analyse tweets to show user behaviour across different languages and cultures as matches unfold, illustrating how Twitter responds to a team’s performance.
Difficulties with online language meant the 20 researchers at the Centre for Global Intelligent Content in DCU had a challenge to overcome says Co-Leader of the Brazilator project team, Lamia Tounsi:
“Tweets typically contain noisy, diverse and unstructured language, such as incomplete sentences, misspellings, abbreviations, web links, emoticons and hashtags – these are just some of the issues that have to be addressed. The Brazilator World Cup service evaluates machine translation systems and helps to identify the most effective translation options for this type of web content.”
The Brazilator app has been launched in time for the remainder of the World Cup, with the research used to create it being used to build and evaluate machine translation engines, adapt existing engines to the football domain and for social media behaviour analyse.
Image Source: Brazilator
Mark Hogan
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