Browser-based Multilingual Translation

Informazioni relative al progetto

Bergamot

ID dell’accordo di sovvenzione: 825303

DOI

10.3030/825303

Progetto chiuso

Data della firma CE 12 Novembre 2018

Data di avvio 1 Gennaio 2019

Data di completamento 30 Giugno 2022

Finanziato da

• INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP - Leadership in enabling and industrial technologies - Information and Communication Technologies (ICT)

Costo totale

€ 2 999 096,25

Contributo UE

€ 2 999 096,25

Coordinato da

THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH
United Kingdom

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - Bergamot (Browser-based Multilingual Translation)

Periodo di rendicontazione: 2020-07-01 al 2022-06-30

Sintesi del contesto e degli obiettivi generali del progetto

Machine translation, such as from French to English, is commonly used in travel, e-commerce, government, and to support Ukrainian refugees. Typically text is sent the cloud for translation but this endangers user privacy. In a business or government context, cloud translation may be banned to protect confidentiality. Our machine translation system runs locally, preserving privacy and removing the risk of disclosure. Moreover, it does not require Internet access.

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.

Lavoro eseguito dall’inizio del progetto fino alla fine del periodo coperto dalla relazione e principali risultati finora ottenuti

The project has a Firefox extension with 34,000 users that translates locally and a desktop application at https://translatelocally.com. The applications support translation for Bulgarian, Czech, English, Estonian, French, Polish, and Spanish. On a range of consumer laptops and desktops dating from 2012 to 2019, the desktop application translates 1000-9000 words per second.

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.

Progressi oltre lo stato dell’arte e potenziale impatto previsto (incluso l’impatto socioeconomico e le implicazioni sociali più ampie del progetto fino ad ora)

Free local translation preserves privacy and empowers users who work with sensitive data. Extending Firefox means the project will be widely available. Open source enables extension and the possibility for the community to contribute translation models for underserved languages. The form filling assistant enables users to respond in languages they do not speak, going beyond ordinary web translation.

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.

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