Neural translation models leverage TED’s unique data and SYSTRAN AI expertise
SYSTRAN, the leader in AI-based translation technology, announces its new partnership with TED, a nonprofit organization devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading, to build specialized neural translation models that are based on high-quality translations of TED Talks. These unique models are designed to meet the sophisticated translation needs of multinational companies, educational institutions, government agencies, and other organizations by enabling accurate and fluent translations of learning, scientific, business and technical content in 10 languages.
“SYSTRAN is TED’s first-ever authorized partner in bringing together TED content and machine learning to develop a commercial product,” said Alex Hofmann, Director, Global Distribution & Licensing at TED. “The fact that our inaugural collaboration in the AI space is focused on neural machine translation models built from translations of TED Talks in multiple languages feels natural and are now available on a licensed basis to help enterprises and organizations meet their most sophisticated translation needs.”
The proprietary models are developed by SYSTRAN, pairing TED’s unique multilingual data and SYSTRAN’s AI expertise, and are an early step in advancing TED data usage in wider applications. Authorized use of TED data for commercial AI and machine learning purposes requires a license from TED, and SYSTRAN is the first to obtain such a license. In accordance with SYSTRAN’s core principles of security and data privacy, TED fully preserves its intellectual property and ownership of its data as well as the specialized models. The TED-owned models are available on the SYSTRAN Marketplace, a catalog of specialized models for specific domains such as legal, finance, health, education, science/technology and many more.
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“This strategic partnership is about taking our shared goals of connecting people and cultures and facilitating multilingual engagement globally,” said the CIO of SYSTRAN, John Paul Barraza. “The human-created translations generated by the TED Translator community are of the highest quality, enabling SYSTRAN to build accurate and fluent translation models for use across a plethora of business and professional applications.”
SYSTRAN conducted double-blind human evaluations on the TED models it built, and the results show impressive improvements in both accuracy and fluency over baseline state-of-the-art generic models. The human evaluations also revealed unanticipated results, with 41 percent of the models scoring higher than the human reference translations.
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“The current global situation is showing us how inter-connected the different countries and populations worldwide are. Companies are imagining a world with far less boundaries – starting with the way we communicate,” said Jean Senellart, SYSTRAN CEO. “Introducing TED models to the SYSTRAN Marketplace is an incredible opportunity and will respond to real needs in the translation of educational, business, scientific, and technical materials.”
