Our recent journey took us to the vibrant heart of HafenCity, where we had the opportunity to participate in an inspiring workshop with our esteemed client, KlimaInvest. Nestled amidst breathtaking views of the surrounding harbor landscape, the company’s new office provided the perfect setting for gaining deep insights into their team dynamics and work processes. Accompanied by a hint of fresh sea breeze, the workshop focused on various aspects that KlimaInvest will advance in 2024. Here are some of the prominent points that were highlighted during the event:

An in-depth introduction and analysis of KlimaInvest’s products and solutions by the CEO, Johannes Schimler, contributing to a better understanding of market conditions and the company’s strategic direction.

Extensive adjustments in the CRM system are planned for KlimaInvest in the first half of 2024.

Furthermore, lively discussions were initiated on ensuring operational and process stability in increasingly integrated applications. Together with JaMoin, we also explored optimization potentials of tests and test infrastructure to further enhance the efficiency and quality of processes.

In the images we share here, you can enjoy the stunning view from KlimaInvest’s office.

We thank KlimaInvest for the opportunity to participate in this enlightening workshop and look forward to further successful collaboration in the service of a greener future.

LangTec is a teenager!  As we recently celebrated our 13th anniversary, we took the opportunity to reflect on our journey and to celebrate our achievements as a team. And what better way to commemorate this milestone than by indulging in a delightful team lunch at Bullerei Deli restaurant, nestled in the vibrant Schanze district and helmed by the renowned TV chef, Tim Mälzer.

The ambiance of Bullerei Deli provided the perfect backdrop for our celebration as we eagerly explored the restaurant’s new menu, boasting a fusion of Japanese influences, classic dishes, many poultry delights, and an array of vegetarian options.

Our culinary standouts were the Mushroom Pasta 24/7, crispy Karaage, steaming Tantanmen, and the Veggie Larb – something for everyone.

Thirteen years of innovation, collaboration, and growth have brought us to this moment, and we look forward to the challenges and successes that lie ahead.
Cheers to Langtec, and to the delicious memories created at the Bullerei deli!

The German Federal Archives store 40 to 55 million pages of torn Stasi files. These are to be restored through automatic virtual reconstruction. A previous pilot project was unable to complete the task adequately, as even the Tagesschau reported on 21.04.2023. An expression of interest procedure has now been launched for a two-part project consisting of a scanning process and virtual reconstruction. We are applying for the automatic virtual reconstruction. The core task is to develop an automated process for arranging scanned document snippets into full pages and complete documents.

At the end of January, we visited the German Stasi Records Archive to talk to the Vice President of the Federal Archives, Alexandra Titze, and present our approach. As a research-oriented technology provider, LangTec showcases an innovative AI-based approach that enables efficient processing of the large amounts of text and data that the volume of Stasi documents inevitably represent.

We are going to follow the topic with great interest and look forward to a possible future collaboration!

This the season of joy, laughter, twinkling lights and delicious food and this year’s LangTec Winter Holiday Party was no exception.  We began on a snowy evening at the Hamburg Planetarium where we travelled back 2000 years to investigate theories of the true origin of the celestial wonder of the “Star of Bethlehem”.
From there we took a Moia and sped forward in time to Yaku, a modern Peruvian/Mexican fusion restaurant in Hamburg’s Grindelviertel, where we indulged in course after course of new, wonderful and colourful flavour combinations and merry mescal cocktails.

Happy holidays from our LangTec family to yours!

The use of artificial intelligence is becoming increasingly important in technical communication. In order to offer our customers the best possible solutions for AI-based text and language technology applications, parson has started a cooperation with the Hamburg-based technology provider LangTec. LangTec develops innovative language technology solutions for the efficient processing of large amounts of text and data with special focus on AI and machine learning.

“LangTec’s know-how and many years of experience with machine learning and artificial intelligence perfectly complement our expertise in the field of technical documentation. Together we can develop the best possible solutions for the use of artificial intelligence in technical communication,” says Ulrike Parson, CEO of parson AG.

“We are very pleased about this close cooperation with parson AG. As one of the leading providers of AI-based language technology in the German-speaking market, it is particularly important for us to work with established players who are ready to put custom text analytics solutions into production. AI becomes valuable when it helps to gain concrete competitive advantages,” says Dr. Patrick McCrae, founder and managing director of LangTec.

About parson

parson is a leading service provider of smart content and intelligent information solutions. parson AG advises its customers on the digitalization of content processes and the introduction of a sustainable content strategy. For products, software and services, parson delivers semantically enriched, modular content such as user documentation, programming instructions, online help, eLearning content and specifications.

Fine-Tuning of a Language Model

To kick off the partnership with LangTec, parson presents a pilot project at this year’s tcworld conference 2023. This model projects deals with the fine-tuning of a Large Language Model (LLM) and was realized jointly with LangTec.

In their presentation, Helle Hannken-Illjes and Ulrike Parson show first results of the domain-specific fine-tuning of a pre-trained large language model (LLM) on customer-specific data. The presented model can be operated locally and is hence also perfectly suited for processing sensitive customer data:

AI yes, but not ChatGPT! How do I get my own language model? (in German)

Helle Hannken-Illjes and Ulrike Parson, presentation

tcworld 2023, November 15, 2023, 9.00 a.m., room C6.2

Find out more

In a new project aimed at advancing sustainability in the industrial sector, LangTec is happy to announce its collaboration with one of the leading global players in the steel and metal distribution industry. As part of this collaboration, LangTec contributes senior backend development expertise to help build solutions that revolutionise the way we think about carbon emissions in the supply chain.

Our client’s Sustainability Team has been on a mission to empower endcustomers with all the information they need to make environmentally conscious choices. Equipped with a groundbreaking system for calculating carbon emissions throughout the entire product lifecycle, the Sustainability Team is now adding LangTec’s development expertise to take this initiative to the next level.

We are contributing to an improved solution that will make it easier to track and analyse the environmental impact of various materials and vendors, from raw material delivery to the final leg of transport to the end-user. Moreover, LangTec will be involved in integrating an authentication system to further streamline the user experience and provide a seamless interaction path towards greener, more sustainable customer choices.

For our client from Southern Germany we designed, extensively tested and now deployed to the cloud a production system which each day transforms ten-thousands texts within a few hours and reports them back. The client sent short texts are automatically transformed using ChatGPT from OpenAI. As part of this process ChatGPT answers are linguistically checked for undesired words whose presence triggers regeneration of such texts. To reach the required processing speed while staying below load limitations, we use a high degree of parallelization on different architectural levels.

As already reported here in a joint research phase with a leading northern German company in the field of technical documentation LangTec has been working on a AI-based authoring support system for text completion in the text domain of technical documentation.

Now we can report extremely convincing results for this proof of concept. Among other results we were able to improve prediction accuracy on the next word by 45 (top 10 predictions) to 62 (top 1) percentage points due to finetuning the base language model on client data. Additionally, this project allowed LangTec to use and extend its expertise in the field of neural language models, especially with respect to deeper interventions in the standard software architecture of the language model.

This year the weather did not mean well with us at first: It took us three attempts, but on that sunny day it worked out and we met at the Supper Club Hamburg for cool drinks and water sport activities. With an SUP, a canoe and a pedal boat we toured over the Alster and met Irish musicians and the waves of the Alster steamer on the way… Everyone stayed dry and so in the evening we moved towards Schanze to the restaurant JING JING. An excellent, super flavourful 4-course menu propelled us straight to Thailand! Now what exactly was part of the concept, and what not, remains open, but we can say for sure that we had a fantastic time 🙂

Technical documentation requires a specific sublanguage by convention and regulation, which poses a challenge when different technical writers must create new documents in a coherent manner. So far, our client employs rule-based systems that enforce consistent structure and style, which can only detect problems that trigger manually-created style checking rules.

In a joint research phase, LangTec will now develop the proof of concept for an authoring support system that offers text completion features in document creation without the need to specify any explicitly defined rules up-front.

The goal of this AI project is to support technical writers by reducing any repetitive manual work. The central task will be to suggest the most fitting continuation of sentences when creating new technical documents. LangTec will select one of the the available very large language models, perform a domain-specific finetuning based on a large number of existing documents, and formally evaluate the resulting model’s prediction accuracy.