TransModal success The University of Edinburgh

Professor Mirella Lapata has received five years' funding for her project, TransModal: Translating from Multiple Modalities into Text. The European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Grant worth 1.9M will begin in September. ERC Consolidator Grants are for researchers of any nationality with 7-12 years of experience since completion of their PhD (plus 18 months for each child), a scientific track record showing scientific talent and an excellent research proposal. Professor Lapata's award winning proposal is summarised on the ERC website as follows: "Recent years have witnessed the development of a wide range of computational methods and tools that process and generate natural language text. Many of these have become familiar to mainstream computer users such as tools that retrieve documents matching a query, perform sentiment analysis, and translate between languages. Indeed, publicly available systems like Google Translate can instantly translate between any pair of over fifty human languages allowing users to access web content that wouldn't have otherwise been available. "The accessibility of the web could be further enhanced with applications that not only translate between different languages (eg.