New DFG project for Sabine Schulte im Walde

We are excited to announce that Unit Member Prof. Schulte im Walde has been granted a new DFG project entitled “MeTRapher: Learning to Translate Metaphors”.

The interpretation and translation of metaphors is a challenging task which has received much attention in the cognitive, linguistics and translation communities. The natural language processing (NLP) community provides tools for monolingual metaphor detection and interpretation as well as excellent cross-lingual representations and machine translation systems, but little work addresses metaphors in machine-learning translation. Metaphors are not only very flexible in their structures and meanings; they also strongly depend on the involved languages and cultures. Our long-term vision is to create a modular machine-learning translation system across language pairs that induces and successfully integrates knowledge and conditions for metaphor translation.

The project MeTRapher is a SemRel project in collaboration with Alexander Fraser at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. It is funded by the DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, the German Research Foundation) under research grant SCHU 2580/7-1.