Lieve Macken

Lieve Macken is Associate Professor at the Department of Translation, Interpreting and Communication of Ghent University with 28 years of experience in language technology. She started her career at the Center for Computational Linguistics of the University of Leuven, developing a Simplified English Grammar Checker and Corrector (SECC), which was used as a front-end for machine translation systems helping to improve translation quality and reduce post-editing work by simplifying the input.

She worked at the R&D-department of Lernout & Hauspie Speech products and Scansoft for more than 8 years. She developed, first as language specialist, and later as a project and team leader text-to-speech systems for English.

From 2006 to 2009, she had the technical leadership of the Dutch Parallel Corpus project. In 2010 she defended her PhD "Sub-sentential alignment of translational correspondences", which formed the basis of the TExSIS bilingual terminology extraction system.

She was promotor of the ROBOT project (HOF, 2012-2016) and supervised the PhD of Joke Daems entitled "A translation robot for each translator? A comparative study of process and quality of manual translation and the postediting of machine translations", in which the translation behavior of professional and novice translators has been observed using keystroke logging and eye-tracking software. In the framework of SCATE (Smart Computer-aided translation environment, IWT SBO, 2014-2018), she supervised the PhD of Arda Tezcan on Quality Estimation of Machine Translation. In the framework of PreDicT(Predicting Difficulty in Translation, BOF UGent), she supervised the PhD of Bram Vanroy and syntactic difficulties in translation.

She is currently supervisor of the Horizon Europe Marie Sklodovska Curie Personal Fellowship of Paola Ruffo (2022-2024). She (co-)supervises two PhD-projects in which Natural Language Processing and/or Machine Translation is used for educational (language learning) purposes: she is supervisor of the PhD of Margot Fonteyne (WiLMa: Writing in a Second Language with Machine Translation, BOF, 2021-2024) co-supervisor of the PhD of Jasper Degraeuwe (IVESS: Intelligent vocabulary and example selection for Spanish vocabulary learning, FWO, 2019-2024) and co-supervisor of Amaury Van Parys (Cross-lingual assessment of lexical and grammatical reading demands in the L2 classroom and their effect on learners' comprehension). She is co-supervisor of the MaTIAS project (Machine Translation to Inform Asylum Seekers, AMIF, 2023-2025). 

She has extensive experience as reviewer/referee (both of journal and conference articles and research projects) and was external examiner of seven PhD candidates. She was guest editor of the Special Issue "Advances in Computer-Aided Translation Technology", of the peer-reviewed journal Informatics (2019).

She is coordinator of the postgraduate program Computer-Assisted Language Mediation, co-coordinator of the European Master's in Technology for Translation and Interpreting (EM-TTI). She teaches Computer-Assisted Translation, Machine Translation, and Dissertation (parts I and II).