The research is being led by the University of Santiago de Compostela and is funded by the BBVA Foundation

The researcher Natàlia Català from the Department of Romance Studies at the URV is a member of a team of experts in linguistics and computing who are working on the MultiGenera project, which aims to develop the prototype for a didactic linguistic application that automatically generates noun phrases with semantic information.

The aim of the research it to make searches in lexical databases of different languages quicker and more effective by giving meaning to noun phrases, thus providing fundamental support for research into linguistics. The prototype will also purposely create incorrect structures to improve the rules governing automatic translators. This will make their translations more accurate and more similar to natural language.

The development of MultiGenera, which works in Spanish, French and German, will provide numerous useful examples in teaching, comparative grammar, lexicography and automatic translation.

The project is headed by the University of Santiago de Compostela (USC) and has been chosen from 143 competing proposals for one of the five research grants offered by the BBVA Foundation for scientific research in the Digital Humanities.

The project is entitled ‘Multilingual generation of noun phrases and automation of the extraction of syntactic and semantic data (MultiGenera)’ and the research team consists of thirteen specialists from different universities, coordinated by María José Domínguez from the USC.