Environmental Information Dissemination: Computer-aided Edition, Translation and Presentation of Information

Project Leader: Philippe Langlais (Université de Montréal)

This project, funded by contributions from Environnement Canada (2008 through 2020) by a Mitacs/Mprime grant (2009 through 2011), explores new ways of customizing and translating the mass of daily information produced by Environment Canada (EC). This information in digital format is later transformed into weather and environmental forecasts, specifically warnings and alerts that must be broadcast in real-time in at least two languages, in many different formats and in a way that takes location into account. Given the critical importance of weather and environmental information in many spheres of activity, this project explores innovative ways for combining, condensing and displaying the specific types of data encountered in the environmental domain. It combines data-mining techniques in order to extract important information, with cognitive and linguistic methods for displaying it to the users in a meaningful way.

For the 2017 to 2020 period, the following goals have been defined:

• Develop a verification and validation system to determine the effort needed by professional translators to finalize a first automated translation.
• Adapt an alert bulletin translation engine for dissemination on social networks such as Twitter.
• Continue improving the WATT system.

Initial description of the project