Fred BLAIN, PhD
Researcher in NLP/MT at The University of Sheffield, UK
I am a Research Associate in Lucia Specia's team, as well as a member of the University of Sheffield NLP group. My research area is Machine Translation with a particular interest for discriminative training algorithms, quality estimation and continuous adaptation from post-editing workflow. I am currently funded by a european project named QT21. I also hold a grant from the Amazon Academic Research Awards (AARA) program, and a grant from the European Association of Machine Translation (EAMT).
Before coming to Sheffield, I was a postdoctoral researcher at Le Mans University in France (2013-2014), working on MateCAT. I also worked as a research engineer at Systran (2009-2012) during my PhD which I received from Le Mans University in 2013. The topic of my thesis is Evolutive Translation Models. I was supervised by Holger Schwenk (Facebook FAIR) and Jean Senellart (Systran).
Latest articles
Findings of the WMT 2018 Shared Task on Quality Estimation
Combining Quality Estimation and Automatic Post-editing to Enhance Machine Translation output
My work in few words
Machine Translation is a tool and I do believe that, as for any tool, it has to be useful to its final user. This is what designing a good quality system means to me. For this reason, I focus on what could help to make a system better: adaptation to the task, efficient optimisation, evaluation that correlates human judgment, use of user feedback (a.k.a. post-editing) more…