Babeldr, un outil de traduction fiable du dialogue médical

At the Hôpitaux Universitaires de Genève (HUG), Geneva’s largest hospital, 52% of all patients are foreign nationals and more than 10% speak no French at all. In the context of the ongoing European refugee crisis, the medical professionals at HUG, particularly in the emergency and immigrant health service departments, often find they have no language in common with a patient. Particularly important languages are Tigrinya, Arabic and Farsi; as of September 2015, Eritreans, Syrians and Afghans make up about 60% of all new asylum seekers. Language barriers of this kind pose serious problems regarding the quality, security and equitability of health care, a phenomenon which has been the subject of detailed investigation by several teams over the last twenty years. In this lecture, Prof Bouillon will introduce her work on BabelDr, a spoken language translation system for the medical domain, developed in collaboration with Hôpitaux Universitaires de Genève (HUG). Its main focus is precision and less-resourced languages. The talk will be given in French.

About the Speaker

Pierrette Bouillon has been Professor at the FTI, University of Geneva since 2007. She is currently Director of the Department of Translation Technology (referred to by its French acronym TIM) and Dean of the FTI. She has numerous publications in computational linguistics and natural language processing, particularly within lexical semantics (Generative lexicon theory), speech-to-speech machine translation for limited domains and more recently pre-edition/post-edition. In the past, she participated in different EU projects (EAGLES/ISLE, MULTEXT, etc.) and was lead for three Swiss projects in speech translation: MEDSLT 1 and 2 (offering a system for spoken language translation of dialogues in the medical domain) and REGULUS (a platform for controlled spoken dialog application) and two projects in computer assisted language learning: CALL-SLT 1 (a generic platform for CALL based on speech translation) and CALL-SLT 2 (designing and evaluating spoken dialogue based CALL systems). Between 2012 and 2015, she coordinated the European ACCEPT project (Automated Community Content Editing PorTal). At present, she co-coordinates the new Swiss Research Center for Barrier-free Communication with the Zurich University of Applied Sciences and the project BabelDr with the HUG (Geneva University Hospitals). She is also taking part in the new COST network EnetCollect : European Network for Combining Language Learning with Crowdsourcing Techniques.