Progress of the PRINCIPLE Project: Promoting MT for C roatian, I celandic, I rish and N orwegian (2020)

Abstract: This paper updates the progress made on the PRINCIPLE project, a 2-year action funded by the European Commission under the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) programme. PRINCIPLE focuses on collecting high-quality language resources for Croatian, Icelandic, Irish and Norwegian, which have been identified as low-resource languages, especially for building effective machine translation (MT) systems. We report initial achievements of the project and ongoing activities aimed at promoting the uptake of neural MT for the low-resource languages of the project.

## achievements and ongoing activities most of principle's key activities are already well underway and will continue into the second year of the action. such activities include coordination; use-case analysis, data requirements and data preparation; development, evaluation and deployment of mt systems; identification, collection and consolidation of lrs; and, finally, dissemination. in contrast, most of the work on exploitation and sustainability will take place from july 2020, when more mature results will be available to share with the community. the progress of the project is constantly monitored via milestones that help to verify that the work is on track to achieve the goals of the action. at the time of writing, in its first eight months, principle has already achieved three of these milestones, namely (i) the adoption of the jointly written project implementation plan that defines key aspects of how the action operates, (ii) the preparation of a detailed report on the use-cases, data requirements and data preparation agreed with various stakeholders in each participating country, and more recently (iii) the design of the software architecture of the mt systems to be built by iconic for the early adopters (eas) as part of the project, with a view to releasing the first batch by october 2020. the eas are data contributors who have also agreed to work with the principle consortium to introduce custom-built mt engines developed by iconic into their translation workflow on the basis of their defined use-cases and requirements. these domain-adapted mt systems will be evaluated by dcu with flexible protocols including state-of-the-art automatic metrics and human/manual techniques matching the use-cases and scenarios that have been previously defined. this is a crucial step to validate the quality of the lrs in real user settings, thereby confirming their value to the actual improvement of mt system development, before uploading the data sets collected in the project to elrc-share. as part of this ongoing effort, the consortium has already established, and continues to seek, partnerships with public and government bodies as well as private entities in croatia, iceland, ireland and norway who can provide valuable lrs to the project. by way of example, at the time of writing three data providers in croatia have confirmed that they will be contributing lrs, thereby offering access to over 1,250 documents of varying length, and containing data from various dsis. the croatian principle partner is currently inspecting these documents to check their relevance to ejustice and eprocurement as well as their quality, before selecting those that are deemed suitable for further processing. ## future plans preliminary indications suggest that the project is on track to achieve its ambitious objectives for lr collection, and the consortium partners will continue to collaborate with existing and new data contributors in croatia, iceland, ireland and norway to focus on the ejustice and eprocurement dsis that are prioritised by the action. work to be done in the remainder of the project includes exploring the feasibility of creating new national relay stations 3 for the coordinated collection of lrs in croatia, iceland and norway, after their successful introduction by the elri project. finally, future plans also involve expanding and consolidating the lrs collected by the project, and intensifying dissemination activities, with a series of workshops scheduled in the four countries represented in principle by july 2021.