Periodic Reporting for period 2 - Bergamot (Browser-based Multilingual Translation)
Berichtszeitraum: 2020-07-01 bis 2022-06-30
Running locally requires speed to run on desktop CPUs, low memory consumption, and small download sizes. The experience should be integrated with a desktop application and in the browser. A Firefox extension translates web pages locally. Going beyond simply translating pages, an assistant will help users fill out forms that expect responses in another language. The system should also estimate its own confidence and display it to users, warning of potentially incorrect translations.
An assistant supports filling forms where users can type in their own language and translations are entered as responses. Users can tick a box "highlight potential errors in red" to see where translation may be lower quality according to the system's self-assessment.
Our project featured in over 100 news articles including TechCrunch, Yahoo News, making #1 on Hacker News twice.
Our project has pushed boundaries of efficient neural network models, making them faster or supporting larger models on consumer devices. These methods have implications the speed and quality of other systems like captioning and summarization.
Estimating the system's own quality ensures trust in algorithms, a rising societal issue, is placed more appropriately. Moreover, it requires less labeling, so the technology can be applied more widely for languages with less data available.