Pidgin

Financially supported by the Dutch government within the framework of the CIC-programme (Compete with ICT-competences) of the Ministries of Economic Affairs and of Educational and Cultural Affairs. In the Netherlands a consortium of five organisations started the project with the aim to improve the cross-lingual communication on the Internet. The name PidGin has been derived from the pidgin languages that were developed between people with different language backgrounds during colonial times. The Pidgin-project is an unique project which combines the sciences of IT and linguistics. By using special techniques of both sciences, Pidgin enabled internet users all over the world: 1. to retrieve multi-lingual information from the internet (human-machine); 2. to communicate with their fellow users in their own native languages (human-human). Pidgin combined advanced search techniques with translation strategies. To improve the searching, the computer had to be able to “understand” language by way of syntactic and semantic analysis. The further development of these techniques can be stimulated by translation techniques that go beyond the currently available translation techniques that are based on machine translation or translation memory. Pidgin is self learning and makes use of an enormous semantic network. The idea behind Pidgin was not to deliver perfect translations, but to improve cross-lingual communication between man and machine and between people. It is like real life communication between two persons with a different mother tongue: by talking and writing to each other, each one of them will learn more about the language of the other person. PidGin makes use of the same principle. Every time Pidgin is used it learns from the user and improves its own knowledge. The project has been executed in two phases: at the end of the year 2002 the project yielded the first results of the cross lingual communication between man and machine. The perfection of the cross-lingual communication between between people was planned for the year 2004.