Category Archives: Artificial intelligence

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village At the recent TAUS webinar on “geo-linguistic shifts” two leading experts in the field, Lane Green and Nicholas Ostler (see bios below), discussed whether machine translation could one day replace English as the world’s “lingua franca”. The first TAUS debate on this topic between Green …

“Is machine translation taking over from English as the global communication language?”

by Steve Dept – cApStAn partner Will AI allow test development, item banking, item localization, validation and multilingual test delivery to all happen in one integrated environment? The AI behind adaptive translation is not the same as the AI behind item generation, but they can work together to build a robust boiler plate in multiple …

“Offline AI and boiler plate approach in multilingual testing”

  by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Just out: the World Economic Forum’s “The future of jobs” 2018 edition. The report foresees major disruptions to labour markets, but says demand for new roles will offset the decreasing demand for others, with “net job gains” estimated at 58M. Their analysis suggests that …

“Jobs for the future: automation versus augmentation”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Tech companies driving the progress in neural machine translation (NMT) tend to fall into the trap of comparing NMT output with human output. Earlier this year Microsoft announced that its NMT had reached parity with human translation, which prompted lively debates in the linguistic ecosystem …

“Recent research looks at the debate on man vs machine translation parity from a new angle”

by Steve Dept – cApStAn partner In some areas, AI may be a hype. Not so for neural machine translation (NMT). On a daily basis, we hear and read about the new threats and opportunities that come with new advances in artificial intelligence (AI). In the field of translation, the advances are real, the opportunities …

“Garbage in, garbage out: feed AI translatable items”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Academia with a vision? Are we breaking the traditional codes that open doors to the realm of the intellectual elite? This blockchain university project is “geographically agnostic,” prioritizing a “borderless” academic community over local or national ties. Lower tuition fees for students? Less red tape? …

“World’s first blockchain university set to become “the Airbnb of degree courses””

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village In his fascinating 2017 book, “Deep thinking”, Garry Kasparov recounts his career as world chess grandmaster and his 18-year experience in playing chess against computers, culminating in the 1997 match against IBM’s “Deep Blue”. The book offers unique insights into “where machine intelligence ends and …

“Garry Kasparov on chess, AI and the relationship between technology and privacy”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Automatic item generation (AIG) is one of the innovations in testing discussed at the recent Association of Test Publishers’ (ATP) annual conference in San Antonio, Texas. Multiple choice questions have been the traditional way of testing for generations; the advent of new forms of computerised …

“Automatic Item Generation in testing”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village While at cApStAn we investigate how neural machine translation (NMT) can be used to improve a human translator’s output rate while increasing consistency, blue chip companies driving the progress in NMT still fall into the trap of comparing the NMT output with human output. Microsoft …

“Has Microsoft’s neural machine translation (NMT) really reached parity with human translation?”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village On April 4, Amazon Translate, which was in “preview” mode since 2017, was made available to anyone in the US and EU (with an Amazon Web Services account). In doing so, Amazon positions itself as one of the 20+ existing providers of neural network-based translation …

“The neural network-based translation technology “Amazon Translate” now generally available”