UM scholar gives talk on how language technologies shape AI

The University of Macau (UM) held the 27th UM Scholar Research Forum today (22 September), where Wong Fai, professor in the Department of Computer and Information Science in the Faculty of Science and Technology and leader of the Natural Language Processing & Portuguese-Chinese Machine Translation Laboratory, gave a talk titled ‘From Words to Worlds: The Journey of Language Technologies in Shaping AI’. The talk was well attended, with many students and teachers joining online.

During the talk, Prof Wong provided an overview of the development of natural language processing (NLP) and machine translation (MT) technologies, from early statistical machine translation to neural machine translation, and the recent emergence of generative artificial intelligence and large language models (LLMs). He also shared his experiences and insights gained over 25 years of research and introduced the Portuguese-Chinese Machine Aided Translation System developed by his team.

Wong Fai

The Q&A and discussion session