On January 12 and 13, 2017, at the CIUTI Forum held at the United Nations Conference Center in Geneva, Switzerland, Youyi HUANG, Executive Vice President of Translators Association of China (TAC) and President of Language Big Data Alliance (LBDA), delivered a speech titled “Collaborative Innovation of AI, Big Data and Language”, and shared views on the trend of the language service industry in the era of Artificial Intelligence (AI) with experts and scholars from different countries.
Youyi HUANG, President of LBDA addresses the meeting
Mr. HUANG talked about the challenges facing the industry in the era of AI and how it could translate those challenges into opportunities. He pointed out that the emergence of neural machine translation, the application of speech interactive technology and the rapid development of the Internet Era had a huge impact on traditional human translation. Though the industry has begun to realize the importance of AI and other technologies, the mechanism and platform to promote their application is still lacking. Mr. HUANG believed that governments, language colleges, language and AI service providers, experts and freelance translators should join hands in exploring this topic and advise the industry on development in the new era. In addition to the guidance of government and industrial organizations, an effective cooperative mechanism shall be established to ensure the maximum synergy between colleges, research institutes and language service providers. Meanwhile, a platform should be established to facilitate the sharing and exchange of resources and good practices in relation to AI, language big data and other advanced technologies, thus better empowering the language service providers to respond to new challenges.
Mr. HUANG cited LBDA as an example of what we can do in collaborative innovation. As a global, multi-disciplinary and multi-lingual research application alliance, LBDA is committed to building an open platform for cooperation between multiple stakeholders and big data resource sharing; it is intended to support its global members in activities such as teaching, practices, research and business development with its billions of open corpora resources, machine translation technology, speech recognition technology, computer-aided translation platform, translation project management system, language assets management platform, and multi-lingual big data analytical platform, so as to promote the all-around innovation and development of its members. In addition, LBDA will leverage on the collective wisdom of the mathematicians, economists and linguists from the world’s top universities and research institutes in jointly building the machine translation and industry-wide big data laboratories, aiming at exploring the collaborative innovation among businesses, research institutes, and colleges and developing cutting-edge technologies, including among others, the latest global real-time data, big data algorithms on finance, medicine and industry, as well as machine translation.
LBDA currently consists of over 150 members including colleges, businesses and research institutes, and it had been striving to build a worldwide platform for closer collaboration among its members. Since its establishment, LBDA has co-founded, together with its corporate and institutional partners, over 40 practice-based education and innovation centers, including the Chinese-Portuguese-English Machine Translation Laboratory jointly established with Macao Polytechnic Institute, and the Big Data Analysis Laboratory co-founded with Guangdong University of Foreign Studies. By 2017, the number of LBDA members will exceed 220, including more than 60 research institutes and universities out of China.
In the end, Youyi HUANG invited CIUTI guests to the LBDA Annual Meeting which will be held on April 8 and 9, 2017 in Guangzhou, and bring over 500 people from more than 200 colleges, enterprises and government agencies worldwide to share their innovations and insights into the future.
Youyi HUANG talks with a representative from the European Commission
After the meeting, industry experts and scholars exchanged views with Mr. HUANG, on the direction of the language service industry and measures to be taken in the context of AI, and hoped to establish further contact with LBDA in the future and work together for the development of the industry worldwide.