Dr. Patricia O’Neill-Brown

Chief, Human Language Technology, CIA

Dr. Patricia O’Neill-Brown is the Chief of Human Language Technology (HLT) for the CIA. She is responsible for developing the strategy for implementing HLT across the enterprise. She is a leading expert on HLT, including machine translation. Dr. O’Neill-Brown holds a Ph.D in Computational Linguistics from Georgetown University.

Cracking the Code to the Next Breakthrough in Machine Translation

Everyone is looking for the next breakthrough in machine translation. No one believes that machine translation is a completely solved problem. Most people would like to see machine translation systems produce higher quality results.

A good translation is one where the meaning of the source is preserved, and it is rendered correctly in the target language. Users expect accuracy on all of the various levels–grammar, syntax, semantics and pragmatics.

Dr. O’Neill-Brown has been carrying out research and development aimed at improving machine translation accuracy.  Her work includes the development of novel methods that take advantage of semantics and pragmatics to increase user understanding of machine translated results.  This talk will present the results of these research and development efforts.  Dr. O’Neill-Brown will discuss how these techniques aid user understanding of machine translated results and boost machine translation quality.​