EU funded project which delivered controlled languages standards for messages, alerts and protocols arising from terrorism and other security related risks in order to ensure correct transmission of understanding and reliable translation where necessary. The project run between Jan 2008 – Aug 2009. The project page can (still) be accessed at http://message-project.univ-fcomte.fr/. The project was coordinated by Université de Franche-Comté, France. In this project, I was the principal investigator for the University of Wolverhampton and Irina Temnikova was the researcher appointed on the project.

Project description

In many situations, the weakest link is human communication because a protocol or an alert which is badly formulated can provoke a serious accident due to misunderstanding, in particular during a crisis or under stress. Natural languages abound in subtleties and ambiguities which are often a source of confusion. The project aims to overcome these issues by the use of Controlled languages which impose standards of writing, lexics and syntax. This project was intended to aid the production of a standardized form and content of messages, alerts and protocols, which need to be controlled in order to ensure their correct translation where necessary, their transmission between authorities and the general public, their correct understanding and, in case of protocols, their correct execution.

The project was concerned with the development and transfer of a methodology created by the Coordinator in collaboration with the aircraft industry, the health profession, and with the emergency services. It aimed to establish standards concerning the writing of messages, alerts and protocols arising from terrorism and other security-related risks as well as their localization and application to four Member States’ languages (ES, GB, FR, PL). The standards were aimed to be easily extendable to other Member States’ languages.

Publications

• Irina Temnikova, Constantin Orăsan, and Ruslan Mitkov (2012) CLCM - A Linguistic Resource for Effective Simplification of Instructions in the Crisis Management Domain and its Evaluations. In Proceedings of the Eight International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12). Istanbul, Turkey, May, 23-25. pp. 3007 – 3014, (pdf)
• Irina Temnikova and Constantin Orăsan (2009). Post-editing Experiments with MT for a Controlled Language. In Proceedings of the International Symposium on Data and Sense Mining, Machine Translation and Controlled Languages (ISMTCL), Besancon, France, July 1-3, 2009
• Irina Temnikova and Ruslana Margova (2009) Towards a Controlled Language in Crisis Management: The Case of Bulgarian. In Proceedings of the International Symposium on Data and Sense Mining, Machine Translation and Controlled Languages (ISMTCL), Besancon, France, July 1-3, 2009
• Irina Temnikova (2012) Text complexity and text simplification. PhD thesis. University of Wolverhampton, UK, pdf
  (not part of the project, but including some of the research carried out by Irina during the project)

Resources developed by the Wolverhampton team

English leaflet

Training material

This page is for archival purposes only. The project concluded in 2009, but the information may still be interesting for some people. This page was last modified on 3rd Feb 2024