Award for solving language multimodality

“Charles University made it to the super league and Jindřich Libovický won it,” commented Prof. Jan Hajič from the Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics of Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles University, who called the young scientist a rising star.

Jindřich Libovický was awarded for his dissertation thesis Multimodality in Machine Translation in which he developed new methods of combining visual and language input in neural networks. To demonstrate this he used a machine translation where he could subsequently use visual information to solve language multimodality.

“Let’s use English as an example, among a great number of nouns there is missing information about gender (e.g. a football player). When translating in into Czech we need to use the right gender. In this case photography may be used as an additional source of information,” said for iForum Jindřich Libovický, who defended his dissertation thesis in June and who now works at Ludwig-Maximilians-Uviversitӓt Munich.

The Dimitris N. Chorafas Foundation Prize is awarded in cooperation with the Israeli Weizmann Institute of Science. It prizes graduating doctorate students for their outstanding work in fields in engineering sciences, natural sciences, and medicine each year. Prizes were awarded at Charles University for the fifth time this year (first in 2014). Jindřich Libovický was the only rector’s nominee for the prize out of the whole university.

OPMK, Photo: Vladimír Šigut