Two officials from Hamad Bin Khalifa University gave presentations at the Globalisation and Localisation Association conference in Amsterdam, an event organised by the world’s leading trade association for the language industry.
Nada Melhem from the Translation and Interpretation Institute and Majd Abbar from the Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI) presented their ideas at the event.
Melhem’s short talk, titled ‘Creating a Remote Interpreting Unit for Education City (Qatar)’, explored the rationale behind the creation of such a unit, the challenges and difficulties faced during the planning phase, the phases leading to the pilot remote interpreting session, and what needs to be done to change the mindset of interpreters and event organisers about the effectiveness and usefulness of remote interpreting compared to other traditional interpreting equipment.
Abbar’s masterclass included presentations of the full suite of advanced Arabic language technologies, specifically NLP, machine translation, segmentation, parsing, normalisation, diacritisation, speech recognition among others and some of the implementations in real-world solutions, and the reliance on machine learning for all the technologies presented.
“QCRI is one of the top research institutes around the world dealing with Arabic language technologies, so I was pleased to showcase these technologies at the biggest language solutions conference,” Abbar said. “There was great interest in what was presented.”
Majd Abbar
