Army Selects Barron Associates to Develop Machine Translation Capabilities for Low-Resource Languages

Barron Associates has been selected for a Phase II SBIR award to develop and demonstrate a comprehensive set of tools to support efficient deployment of assured MT systems for low-resource languages, including deployment of new systems for languages not previously supported, and performance optimization for specific domains and/or for specific downstream tasks.  The ACE-Translation design emphasizes assurance of the quality and correctness of outputs.  One aspect of enhancing quality is leveraging as much of the available information as possible to produce high quality translations for a language of interest.  A second key aspect of enhancing quality is innovative use of RTA methods. In ACE-Translation, the RTA system uses three parallel and independent translation branches along with a monitoring and switching system that employs state-of-the-art Quality Estimation methods.  The overall system produces highly fluent translations in most cases, and reverts to a less fluent but hallucination-free mode when needed to virtually eliminate incorrect outputs.