One of the tasks of the CLEOPATRA project is to introduce early stage researchers (ESRs) to novel language technologies though secondment in industrial environments. For this purpose two ESRs from Zagreb University visited the Tilde company to learn more about AI-powered machine translation solutions and terminology services. Both researchers were involved in research and development activities related to the challenging task of speech to speech translation. Their direct supervisor was Mārcis Pinnis, chief AI officer at Tilde.
Diego Alves’s PhD studies are devoted to the research and development of natural language processing tools and resources for under-resourced languages. During his stay at Tilde, he was introduced to its machine translation technologies and, together with Tilde’s researchers, worked on methods for data augmentation which allow the creation of machine translation solutions that are robust for dealing with the errors produced by speech recognizers. He reported his research results in several research seminars at Tilde. Research results achieved during the secondment were presented at the Baltic HLT 2020 conference and summarized in the publication: Diego Alves, Askars Salimbajevs and Mārcis Pinnis. 2020. Data Augmentation for Pipeline-Based Speech Translation. Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications, volume 328: Human Language Technologies – The Baltic Perspective, 73-79.
The research activities of Gaurish Thakkar are related to cross-lingual sentiment analysis. Gaurish arrived in Riga in early spring and spent several weeks at the Tilde office with Tilde’s researchers. Later, when strong COVID-19 restrictions were introduced, he continued his secondment in Riga virtually, with regular meetings with his supervisor and employees at Tilde. Research results achieved during the secondment were presented at the Baltic HLT 2020 conference and summarized in the publication: Gaurish Thakkar and Mārcis Pinnis. 2020. Pretraining and Fine-Tuning Strategies for Sentiment Analysis of Latvian Tweets. Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications, volume 328: Human Language Technologies – The Baltic Perspective, 55-61.
Tilde is a leading European language technology company, specialising in language technologies. The company provides custom machine translation systems, online terminology and knowledge management services, mobile applications, intelligent virtual assistants, speech processing (analysis and generation) solutions, and proofing tools. Tilde has specific expertise and competence in developing high-demand cloud-based and desktop language technology solutions for complex, highly inflected languages, particularly smaller European languages. Tilde’s services are used by the European Commission and international companies such as IBM and Microsoft.
Inguna Skadiņa, Chief Scientific Officer, Tilde