Research at Unbabel
I am thrilled to initiate a series of posts describing some recent exciting news. At Unbabel, we have been pioneering advancements in machine learning since 2015 when we initiated Unbabel AI Research. Throughout the years, we have been pushing forward the state of the art in translation quality estimation, evaluation metrics, and automatic post-editing towards building the World’s Translation Layer.
Our work has been presented at top conferences in the field (ACL, NAACL, EMNLP, ICML, NeurIPS, WMT, AMTA, EAMT). We have fuelled open-source projects such as OpenKiwi and COMET that are now relied upon by many researchers around the world in industry and academia for translation quality estimation and evaluation. You can find some of our work at https://unbabel.com/research/
With that, our team is putting pen to paper and providing a platform to give other researchers and engineers a glimpse into our latest advances in research at Unbabel, with the goal to inspire others to use and build their research on top of our work and to contribute to our open-source tools.
We will kickstart this new R&D blog with a sequence of posts showcasing several of our recent achievements in research with topics that include:
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Our presence at the AMTA 2022 Conference, where we participated in two discussion panels, presented a tutorial, and won a best presentation award for our work on Business Critical Errors (our second best paper award this year, just a few months after winning the award at EAMT 2022 for the COMETinho paper).
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Unbabel’s winning participation in the Quality Estimation shared task in WMT, where our system (CometKiwi) obtained the best results in all tracks. Being able to estimate the quality of translation on-the-fly is a holy grail for the translation industry.
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Unbabel’s QUARTZ project (Quality-Aware Machine Translation), a 6-month project funded by ELISE aiming at advancing Responsible Machine Translation — this is key to unblocking domains where translation quality is critical, such as medical, legal, and finance.
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Plus more upcoming projects aimed at bringing translation to the next level.
Stay tuned!