Lexicon, Lexical Semantics, Grammar, and Translation for Norwegian

The LOGON project is a Norwegian National initiative towards re-usable language technology for Norwegian – English Machine Translation (MT). The consortium is comprised of researchers from Oslo University (co-ordinator), Bergen University, and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) at Trondheim. LOGON is among the flagship projects of the recently launched KUNSTI (Knowledge Development for Norwegian Language Technology) programme, funded by the Norwegian Research Council.

Building on earlier work at each site, the project integrates in-depth grammatical analysis of Norwegian (using Lexical Functional Grammar) with precise logical-form meaning representations (in the Minimal Recursion Semantics framework), and full, grammar-based generation for English (using, in turn, Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar). Through collaborations with the Palo Alto Research Center, the LinGO Laboratory at Stanford's Center for the Study of Language and Information, the COGENT project at the Universities of Sussex and Brighton (both UK), and the TrePil project (another KUNSTI component), the consortium has access to a wide range of existing tools and participates in an active, international research program.

Further details on the project organization, scientific approaches pursued, and division of labor among partners is available publicly through the project workplan for 2002 through 2004 (in Norwegian) and the extended workplan for 2005 and 2006 (in English). A somewhat more high-level summary is provided in the project report Som å kapp-ete med trollet? to TMI 2004 and the corresponding slide presentation. A more recent report Towards Hybrid Quality-Oriented Machine Translation (in TMI 2007) summarizes a series of empirical results available towards the completion of the initial project period and emphasizes the combination of approaches in the final LOGON demonstrator.