Tech & Society
Machine Translation at the Border: Faulty translations jeopardize asylum applications.
For some asylum seekers, machine translation errors may make the difference between protection and deportation.
Translation
Business
Repatriating Talent: Lelapa brings AI talent back to Africa.
A South African startup aims to lure talented engineers who left the continent to work abroad. Johannesburg research lab Lelapa.ai bills itself as a haven for African AI engineers who want to work on challenges that aren’t on Silicon Valley’s agenda.
Tech & Society
Language Models, Extended: Large language models grew more reliable and less biased in 2022.
Researchers pushed the boundaries of language models to address persistent problems of trustworthiness, bias, and updatability.
Tech & Society
Translating a Mostly Oral Language: How Meta Trained an NLP Model to Translate Hokkein
Most speech-to-speech translation systems use text as an intermediate mode. So how do you build an automated translator for a language that has no standard written form? A new approach trained neural networks to translate a primarily oral language.
Machine Learning Research
Massively Multilingual Translation: Machine Learning Model Trained to Translate 1,000 Languages
Recent work showed that models for multilingual machine translation can increase the number of languages they translate by scraping the web for pairs of equivalent sentences in different languages. A new study radically expanded the language repertoire through training on untranslated web text.
Culture
Deepfakes Against Profanity: Film Makers of Fall Used AI to Remove F-Words
The filmmakers used technology from Flawless AI to clean up the language, enabling the film to earn a rating that welcomes younger viewers.
Business
Speaking Your Language: Startup Papercup Offers AI-Powered Voice Translation
A startup that automatically translates video voice overs into different languages is ready for its big break. London-based Papercup offers a voice translation service that combines algorithmic translation and voice synthesis with human-in-the-loop quality control.
Tech & Society
Generation Text: How beta testers reacted to GPT-3
People granted early access to OpenAI’s latest language model are raving about its way with words — and more. Beta testers of GPT-3 are showing off the model’s ability to write business memos, craft blogs, pen tweets, and even generate computer code.
Machine Learning Research
Found in Translation: Apple's method to identify a language from a few words
Language models can’t correct your misspellings or suggest the next word in a text without knowing what language you’re using. For instance, if you type “tac-,” are you aiming for “taco,” a hand-held meal in Spanish, or “taca,” a crown in Turkish?
Machine Learning Research
Choosing Words Carefully: BLUERT trains language models to be better translators.
The words “big” and “large” have similar meanings, but they aren’t always interchangeable: You wouldn’t refer to an older, male sibling as your “large brother” (unless you meant to be cheeky). Choosing among words with similar meanings is critical in language tasks like translation.
Machine Learning Research
Human-Level X-Ray Diagnosis: A research summary of CheXbert for labeling chest x-rays
Like nurses who can’t decipher a doctor’s handwriting, machine learning models can’t decipher medical scans — without labels. Conveniently, natural language models can read medical records to extract labels for X-ray images.
Machine Learning Research
Listening to the Brain: NLP researchers used RNNs to translate brain waves into text.
AI has added an unlikely language to its catalog of translation capabilities: brain waves. Joseph Makin led a group from the University of California San Francisco to render a person’s neural signals as English text while the person while the person read a sentence aloud.