The groups winning META Prize are big names, who have contributed to the community useful and practical products for translation and multilingual communications, for example:
MOSES: statistical engine for machine translation
DGT: alignment of a hugh open database to make pairs of sentences between different languages used in EU. See their results provided through the OPUS project: http://opus.nlpl.eu/DGT.php
BabelNet: now provide a multilingual encyclopedia that helps translation with a hugh knowledge base (including Wikipedia): http://live.babelnet.org/
BabelNet live (beta) is the next evolutionary stage of BabelNet, today’s most far-reaching multilingual resource that covers hundreds of languages and, according to need, can be used as either an encyclopedic dictionary, or a semantic network, or a huge knowledge base. BabelNet live (beta) is growing continuously, thanks to being fed with daily updates from all the sources that go to make it up, including Wikipedia, Wiktionary, users’ input, etc.
The Rosetta Foundation: focus on humanitarian translation service, e.g. helping translation to deal with disasters, communicate with refugees. They maintain a web translation platform called Translation Commons (https://trommons.org/) to ask volunteers translate documents from charity organizations as open documents. This Trommons website runs the platform SOLAS developed by University of Limerick (Ireland), which became open source in 2011: http://www.localisation.ie/solas/. In 2017, The Rosetta Foundation merges with Translation Without Borders, a counterpart (non-profit humanitarian organization, focused in translation) in US.
InterACT: the group of Prof. Alex Waibel in Karlsruhe KIT with expertise in speech recognition, who led the project creating EU Bridge (http://www.eu-bridge.eu/) – for Automatic transcription and translation services. EU Bridge provides the services (but they seem to release no tools for public use):
- Captioning translation for TV Broadcasts
- University lecture translation
- European Parliament translation
- Unified communication translation
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The META Prize is awarded by the META Technology Council to outstanding products or services supporting the European Multilingual Information Society.
2017
META Prize
- European Parliament’s Directorate-General for Translation (DG TRAD), European Commission’s Directorate-General for Translation (DGT), and DGT’s MT@EC team – For outstanding, mission-critical and also innovative human as well as automatic contributions to enabling multilingualism in two important European institutions and among European public digital services.
2016
META Prize
- InterACT – For outstanding and innovative contributions to cross-lingual and multilingual communication technologies.
2015
META Prize
- BabelNet – for groundbreaking work in overcoming language barriers through a multilingual lexicalised semantic network and ontology making use of heterogeneous data sources. The resulting encyclopedic dictionary provides concepts and named entities lexicalised in many languages, enriched with semantic relations.
2013
META Prize
- The Rosetta Foundation – for their groundbreaking work enabling the global conversation in communities and social localization, making information available to individuals irrespective of their social status, linguistic or cultural background.
2012
META Prize
- JRC Optima Activity/Language Technology – was awarded for the excellent use of language technologies to reduce information overload and overcome language barriers.
2011
1. META Prize
- Moses – The prize was awarded for exemplary and innovative contributions in statistical machine translation.
2. META Prize
- Jibbigo Mobile Translators, Jibbigo – was awarded for an outstanding voice translator that can translate speech on mobile devices.
- Voxalead, Exalead – was awarded for outstanding software to provide video scanning and transcription services.
- ELRA (European Language Resources Association) – The prize was awarded for exemplary long-term preparation and distribution of language resources and technology.
- LDC (Linguistic Data Consortium) – The prize was awarded for exemplary long-term preparation and distribution of language resources and technology.
Source: http://www.meta-net.eu/meta-prize