Category Archives: Artificial intelligence

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 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”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Over the past few days the internet has been abuzz with talk about GPT-3, OpenAI’s newest AI language model. GPT-3’s predecessor, GPT-2, released in 2019, was already able to produce convincing streams of text in a range of different styles when prompted with an opening …

“OpenAI’s latest language-generating AI is now out, and it is mindboggling”

by Steve Dept, cApStAn CEO Beyond the AI hype and controversial reports about automatic translation achieving parity with human translation, neural machine translation (NMT) has undoubtedly made spectacular progress in the last three years. Should professional translators resist or should they use it? Machine translation software has been around for a long time. In the …

“Should professional translators shun machine translation?”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village The 2018 “Digital Education Action Plan” is the last in a long series of initiatives taken by the EU in the field of digital education. It warns of the persistent divide between and within EU Member States, in particular regarding digital infrastructure and skills, all …

“The EU’s “Digital Education Action Plan” is currently being updated to address the growing global skills challenge”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Students preparing for a job interview have to face a “stark new reality”, reads a recent article by Rachel Metz for CNN Business: they could be vetted in part by artificial intelligence. There is a surge in the use of algorithms to analyze details such …

“There’s a new obstacle to landing a job after college: getting approved by AI”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village “What Happens When Machines Learn to Write Poetry?”. This is the title of a recent article for The New Yorker by Dan Rockmore, Associate Dean for the Sciences and  Director of the Neukom Institute for Computational Sciences at Dartmouth College (1). Rockmore provocatively opens by saying that …

““Encomials: sonnets from Pentametron”, a whimsical anthology of AI-generated poetry”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village A research team from three New Zealand universities has built an AI model regarding language transmission that splits populations up by looking at whether they fall into one of three levels of proficiency in a language, and how fast people learn. The model was trained …

“AI model developed by New Zealand academics can predict the future of endangered languages”