Stay on top of how technology shapes the language services industries
As machine translation quality improves, precision-based metrics struggle to identify the best systems. Why have newer metrics not ousted longtime standard BLEU? Continue reading
Four college students harnessed recent Google Cloud releases to build a translation app that works offline and makes forms accessible to users with disabilities. Continue reading
As the language industry transitions to an operating model where the first draft is mostly generated by machines, many are looking for ways to quantify linguists' value-add. Edit-distance can help. Continue reading
An October 2019 paper by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute examines how China can employ machine translation tools used by consumers to collect data on users outside the country. Continue reading
Less than one year after Google open-sourced its much-discussed language model BERT, experts weigh in on its potential uses in neural machine translation. Continue reading
Mixed reactions from linguists and industry experts as search giant shelves its in-house translation productivity tool Translator Toolkit, which failed to gain real traction since launching in 2009. Continue reading
Leaked documents list additional machine translation capabilities for Siri as part of an upgrade for 2021; tech giant publishes rare neural MT research paper. Continue reading
Facebook has been granted a patent for its machine translation quality evaluation system, which relies on user engagement data to decide which translation users prefer. Continue reading
Baidu launches API for speech-to-speech translation based on technology outlined in late-2018 research paper, which was criticized at the time for overpromising. Continue reading
Characterizing post-editors based on their keystrokes, mouse activity, and other editing actions can help predict speed and, eventually, quality, says a new paper by Unbabel researchers. Continue reading
New research by Google AI explores multilingual NMT on an unprecedented scale. Good for low-resource languages, less so for the rest, results show. Continue reading
Venture capitalists see opportunity as startups begin to apply breakthroughs in transfer learning and new language models, such as BERT, ELMo, OpenAI's GPT-2, and ULMFiT. Continue reading
Virtual assistants are already part of the e-commerce setting, but taking them multilingual and training them for conversations with multiple variables still poses challenges. Continue reading
EU Institutions publish paper on language technologies and AI, as most EU translation departments now use NMT and provide machine translated output to their linguists. Continue reading
Google I/O and Microsoft Build 2019 were short on big language tech reveals, although relevant announcements and previews were sprinkled throughout both events. Continue reading
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