Category Archives: Artificial intelligence

Everyone is confronted with the breakthrough of (and the hype around) ChatGPT, a new AI tool trained by OpenAI launched at the end of last year. ChatGPT works like a written dialogue between the AI system and the person asking it questions. Open AI says the dialogue format “makes it possible for ChatGPT to answer questions, admit its …

“Open AI’s ChatGPT may result in educators having to rethink tests and assessments “

The translator of the future is a human-machine hybrid The gist of a recent article in The Economist is precisely what we at cApStAn Linguistic Quality Control have been applying for years by looking at “augmented translator models” and man-machine interaction in translation environments. We believe that finding the right combination of automation and human intervention is the way forward. …

“The translator of the future is a human-machine hybrid”

Meghan O’Gieblyn is an award-winning author and “spiritual advice columnist” at Wired. In a recent article she reassures us that visual media is not (yet) replacing text as our main form of expression but that do we need to be aware that our relationship to language is changing. On the one hand the artificial intelligence …

“Is visual media replacing text as our culture’s dominant form of expression? Pictures’ capacity to convey “a thousand words” is a palpable advantage”

The latest edition of the International Education Association (IEA)’s newsletter, the IEA Insider, is just out! It is released annually at their General Assembly and this issue features an article by cApStAn founder Steve Dept. In the article Steve talks about cApStAn’s experience with machine translation (MT) and (human) post-editing, and reflects on the role …

“Latest “IEA Insider” now out featuring article by cApStAn LQC co-founder Steve Dept”

It is true that (much) more than half a century of research into machine translation (MT) has not resulted in a technical solution that comes close to “human parity”, contrary to claims based on obsolete metrics such as BLEU scores. It is also true that we have witnessed significant progress in the quality of raw …

“Why TAUS’ 3-step recipe for better machine translation does not work for all”

Imperfections in machine translation (MT) have long motivated systems for improving translations post-hoc with automatic post-editing (APE). (1) In contrast, up to now, little attention had been devoted to the problem of automatically correcting human-generated translations. A study introducing for the first time ever an automatic human translation correction model (TEC) was presented by language …

“After automated post-editing, APE, the next new hot topic is automated (human) translation error correction, or TEC”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village The 2021 edition of the ATP EdTech and Computational Psychometrics Summit (ECPS) took place virtually on December 8th and 9th, 2021. On December 8, in the course of a session titled “Developing Equitable and Fair Learning Products: A Discussion of Ethical AI in EdTech”, leaders …

“Developing Equitable and Fair Learning Products: A Discussion of Ethical AI in EdTech at the ATP EdTech and Computational Psychometrics Summit”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Language really matters when it comes to scientific communication and education. How can you have conversations about science when the scientific terms you wish to talk about do not exist in your own language? Sibusiso Biyela is a science communicator and journalist from South Africa, …

“In South Africa a new AI-based project offers the opportunity for a large corpus of scientific terms to be translated into six indigenous languages”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Google Cloud has recently announced the general availability of Document Translation, a new feature of Translation API Advanced, that lets you translate documents in formats such as Docx, PPTx, XLSx, and PDF while preserving document formatting. This includes right-to-left language support for PDFs, preservation of …

“New Google Cloud service allows you to translate documents while preserving the formatting”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village A recent Google AI blog post on the topic of gender bias in machine translation reports an ambitious but sensible endeavour: the creation of a dataset based on translated Wikipedia biographies. The aim of this dataset is to analyze common gender errors in machine translation. …

“Google AI Introduces A Dataset for Studying Gender Bias in Machine Translation”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Dubbing or subtitles, which is better? § An age-old debate came back to the forefront in 2020 with the Oscar win for the South Korean film “Parasite”, where, at the awards ceremony, director Bong Joon-ho made a strong case for subtitles. “Once you overcome the …

“Deepfake lip syncing technology could help translate film and TV without losing an actor’s original performance”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Adéṣínà Ayẹni is a Nigerian Yorùbá language and culture advocate, anthropological researcher and translator. Yorùbá is a language spoken in West Africa, mostly in the South-West, by ethnic Yorùbá people. Despite having an estimated 45-55 m speakers, it is still a low-resource language. Over the …

“Translations of low-resource languages can now be monetized and contribute to language survival”