Language and AI research center launched in Shanghai

Chang Hui (left), vice-dean of the School of Foreign Languages and Yu Kai (right), executive dean of the Suzhou Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence, unveil the nameplate for the new joint research center for language and artificial intelligence at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, May 29, 2019. [Photo by Cao Chen/chinadaily.com.cn]

A new joint research center for language and artificial intelligence was established at Shanghai Jiao Tong University on Wednesday.

Jointly set up by the university's School of Foreign Languages and the Suzhou Institute for Artificial Intelligence, the center will focus on language intelligence development to facilitate the application of human-computer interaction in the fields of medicine, education and translation.

Projects regarding language resource development and research, machine translation, and intelligent foreign language education will be conducted by artificial intelligence and language specialists at the center, according to Chang Hui, vice-dean of the School of Foreign Languages.

Chang added that the center aims to enrich the corpora - which in linguistics refer to large data-sets of texts used for statistical analysis, testing or validation of linguistic rules - at the university.

The school has set up about 20 corpora of various languages, covering Chinese, Japanese and English.

The center also will work on building a database for translations from Portuguese to Chinese and vice versa.

"The diverse corpora can be further applied in the testing and assessment of language-related education and examinations, which will be more objective and accurate compared to evaluation by humans," said Chang.

If used in language teaching classes, the systems will facilitate efficiency of speaking ability in foreign languages.

Yu Kai, executive dean of the Suzhou Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence, said that the center will be focused on human-computer interaction system development, as well as research and industrialization in fields such as medical diagnosis and voice recognition.