Chilin (HK) Ltd. announced today that it has signed a sizable matching fund agreement under the Enterprise Support Scheme (ESS) with the Innovation and Technology Commission (ITC) of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government. Launched in 2015, the ESS aims to provide funding support for local companies to conduct in-house research and development (R&D) work and to encourage the private sector to invest in R&D.
“We are honoured to receive the government’s support. The funding will help Chilin develop an AI mediated API [PaTTA] in post-editing to improve the results of machine and human translation and output of Computer Aided Translation (CAT) systems. The project specializes on scientific and technological texts on the basis of our prior extensive research into the use of language in bilingual Chinese-English patents,” shared Prof. Benjamin K. Tsou, founder of Chilin (HK) Limited and Project Co-ordinator of the PaTTA project.
ESS project applications must go through a vigorous assessment process led by a panel of independent experts in the innovation and technology sector. They are vetted in terms of the applicant’s technical and management capability, the commercial viability of project deliverables, and the project’s relevance to government policies or in the overall interest of the community.
This decision by the ITC follows several of the company’s earlier successful applications for post-doctoral fellows and research associates under their Research Talent Hub (RTH) Scheme. Chilin (HK) Ltd is confident that the combined support of the two schemes will result in a successful joint effort. Together, the Hong Kong government, industry and academia will bootstrap Hong Kong as a hub in human language technology involving Chinese and English.
The beta version of PaTTA is scheduled for launch in 2023 to streamline the bi-directional translation of scientific and technological text with extensive bilingual terminology and sentence data. The same technology is not only replicable and customisable for other translation domains and language pairs, but also applicable in the training and fine-tuning of Machine Translation (MT) engines and other NLP applications. It will help professional and novice translators make complex decisions on the best choice among non-unique translations of multiple word expressions (MWE) with improved accuracy and productivity, and will be particularly useful in the translator training.
About Chilin (HK) Ltd.
Chilin (HK) Ltd. is a privately held research-focused company based in Hong Kong founded as a spin-off of the City University Enterprises Ltd of Hong Kong. The company draws on research initiated at the university’s Language Information Sciences Research Centre for more than 20 years. It is a successful provider of rigorously curated Chinese language and bilingual big data for many kinds of enterprises and research organizations. High quality English-Chinese sentence pairs in TMX format are available on TAUS Data Marketplace. These can be easily processed by machine learning systems specifically for custom neural machine translation.
For further information, please contact us at chilinhk@gmail.com or (852) 2384 8838.
– AC
