🚄 Indonesia's first high-speed train is proving a success! 40 trains / day (up from 8 at launch) 85% - 90% occupancy rate via Nikkei: asia.nikkei.com/Business/Trans…

Researchers from the University of Melbourne discover that humans 👨🏻‍💻 and machines navigate 🧭 the complexities of #translation in a similar way and demonstrate that #NMT can effectively predict 🔮 translation difficulty. Kat Vylomova (कत् विलोमोव) 🕊️ University of Melbourne #xl8 #t9n #NLP slator.com/humans-and-ai-…

In a standardised study of how pleasant languages sound to foreign people's ears, Tok Pisin rated first! A fun read: economist.com/graphic-detail…

A fascinating post on devpolicy.org today from Ian Anderson and Stephen Howes. Why has health care coverage stalled so badly in much of the Pacific at the same time that it has taken off in Asia? (PNG's poor performance is striking!) devpolicy.org/health-service…

Give the design team behind bijakmemilih.id a raise! That website is so pleasant and useful, love it.

Woke up watching this series of short videos on Papuan languages, very nice: youtube.com/watch?v=1l5jJE… Lots of trivia, like the Bukiyip system having two counting systems, one in base 3 (for coconuts and fish), one in base 4 (for betel nuts and bananas)

🇮🇩 ranks very high on economic optimism. Hope it stays this way #pemilu2024

This #InternationalWomensDay we pay tribute to the wonder women of Catalpa, who are not just smart and skilled but also fearless, funny and feisty! We spoke to 7 women about their jobs, their career paths and their wishes for women and girls on this day. catalpa.io/blog/celebrati…

High internet use but low social media use, hats off to 🇩🇪! Survey by Pew Research Center pewresearch.org/short-reads/20…

Coming to Google Translate: Tetun, Tok Pisin, Balinese, Fijian, Acehnese, and many other languages of SEA & the Pacific! Let's test quality when they release, but potentially a small revolution in MT for our region blog.google/products/trans…

Life update: after 10 years in industry, I'm going back to school for a PhD at Uni. of Melbourne! Started last week, lots of work to do which i'm really looking forward to !

Translation is a complex task involving pre-translation research and post-translation stages. Can #LLMs handle this process step-by-step, relying solely on their internal knowledge? ✨We show that decomposing the translation process significantly improves #Gemini translation

Our paper on generating bilingual example sentences with LLMs got best paper award Australasian Language Technology Association ! arxiv.org/abs/2410.03182 We work with French / Indonesian / Tetun, find that annotators don't agree about what's a "good example", but that LLMs can align with a specific annotator.