Lieve Macken is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Translation, Interpreting and Communication with strong expertise in multilingual language processing. 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 is used ad 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.
Her main research focus is translation technology and more specifically the comparison of different methods of translation (human vs. post-editing, human vs. computer-aided translation), translation quality assessment, quality estimation for machine translation and the prediction of translation difficulties.
She is the operational head of the language technology section of the department, where she also teaches Translation Technology, Machine Translation, and Localisation.
