On 03 December our project partners from all over Germany came to Hamburg for our quarterly meeting of the ZIM-Morpheus ADAPI project. Apart from LangTec, participating parties were the Fraunhofer Institute for Biomedical Engineering (IBMT), the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology (IDMT), as well as the Sulzbach Eye Hospital. With a splendid view onto Elbe river and lots of gingerbread and coffee we had extremely productive project disussions. A marvelous lunch was had at the Au Quai restaurant located right on the Elbe river banks.

Absolutely delighted about this huge expression of trust by our client, one of Europe’s leading providers in public transport and logistics. The one-year extension of our mandate in infrastructure development for document-based enterprise search was received today. Thank you so much. We are totally looking forward to continuing this exciting collaboration!

Another year in which LangTec has supported multiple important organisations in their fight against poverty, starvation, environmental destruction and political grievances. This year, our contiual support went to:

• • Amnesty International
  • Médecins sans Frontières (MSF)
  • Viva con Agua
  • Oxfam

A huge Thank You! to these wonderful organisations for the amazing and important work they do!

With the advent of neural machine translation, translation quality has made a quantum leap in recent years. In fact, translation quality has improved so much that it is now viable for businesses to incorporate machine translation as a major step in their translation pipelines. The big unknown that remains, however, is just how much postprocessing will remain to bring the machine-translation output to the desired quality level prior to delivery.
Enter TCA, LangTec’s machine-learning-based prediction model to address this challenge. Our model analyses the input text and makes reliable predictions on the estimated postprocessing effort to expect. Click here to check out our TCA live demo.

Even if some of our team really have never been to Denmark yet (yes, that’s really true, Maren 🙂 ), we could almost claim that somehow we now all have been there. Our recent team dinner at Hygge was a wonderful treat, indeterminately placed somewhere between the tender delicacies of Denmark and the overwhelmingly colourful wines of South Africa. At the end of the night, everyone had experienced the true meaning of Danish hygge for themselves. And what a night this was!

After more than one year of intense development we have now successfully handed over the browser plugin Risikoradar (risk radar) to our client, the Max-Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. The plugin permits to find and assess risk statements in webpages. The accompanying visualisations further support the user in their interpretation of the risk statements. The application itself is available for download as a Firefox Plugin and as a Chrome Plugin.

We look forward big time to working with Max Blunck, who will be starting in October to reinforce our team of computational linguists here at LangTec. Max holds a degree in computational linguistics and specialises in neural machine translation and machine learning. His academic work addressed curriculum learning, a form of machine learning in which the order of presenting training data to the learning algorithm has a notable effect on the system’s convergence and the performance level it ultimately achieves.
Great to have you with us, Max!

Just in time for the second half of the business year we received the mandate for a new, super-exciting data engineering project. Scheduled to run well into the first quarter of 2020, we will provide hands-on support to our client’s data science team. With an annual revenue of well over 1 bn Euros, our client ranks among the leading producers of adhesive materials worldwide. We are very much looking forward to this collaboration with one of Germany’s most renowned brands!

All’s well that ends well! After a lengthy and certainly somewhat intense application period we received notice today that funding for our first ZIM grant application in the context of our ZIM Netzwork Morpheus has finally been approved. Funding has been granted for our ADAPI project aiming to collect and analyse spoken dialogue between doctor and patient in ophthalmological examinations. Over a period of two years LangTec will implement the semantic analysis of textualised dialogue segments as well as the integration of relevant clinical details into the hospital information system. We greatly look forward to collaboratig with our project partners Fraunhofer Institute for Biomedical Engineering (IBMT), Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology (IDMT) and the Klaus Heimann Eye Research Institute (KHERI) of the Sulzbach Eye Hospital.

Stubbornly resisting all discouragement from weather forecasts emitted by a pessimistic array of weather apps the unwavering LangTec team set out shortly after midday for this year’s summer team event. Roaming Hamburg’s water ways a bunch of intrepid seafarers meandered under speckled skies intermingled with sunny spells just to find a bunch of squeamish clouds unload their content in the very second the bold crew had stepped ashore again. The hungry bunch of travellers was exquisitely fed with plenties of meat, fish and vegetable until no wishes were left unfulfilled. And what a journey it was!