Research at Unbabel
Where machine learning meets human ingenuity
Our research team is advancing the state of the art — and changing the way humans work for the better.
Leading voices in the field
At Unbabel, we’ve built up a team of area experts from around the world, with particular strengths in natural language processing.
Recent publications
We support our researchers as they place their innovative work in top publications. You can see some recent highlights from our team below.
- 2020
Projects
All our research is designed for maximum impact. For our contributions to natural language processing and applied AI, we’ve received numerous awards.
COMET
COMET (Crosslingual Optimized Metric for Evaluation of Translation) is a new neural framework for training multilingual machine translation (MT) evaluation models. COMET predicts human judgments of MT quality. This “ready to use” trained COMET model is available as open-source to benefit the wider MT R&D community.
MAIA
MAIA will employ cutting-edge machine learning and natural language processing technologies to build multilingual AI agent assistants, eliminating language barriers. MAIA's 'translation layer' will empower human agents to provide customer support in real-time, in any language, with human quality.
User-Focused Marian
Improve the pre-existing neural machine translation toolkit “Marian” to address the needs of CEF eTranslation and to broaden its user base (H2020 Co-Funded Project). Terminology, on-the-fly domain adaptation, better documentation and GPU optimization are the focus areas in this Marian iteneration.
MT4ALL
Aims at building data for under-resourced languages in fields of public interest, such as Health and Justice. It’ll contribute to the CEF Automated Translation Building block by enlarging its coverage for language pairs and domains for which parallel data does not exist (H2020 Co-Funded Project).
Unbabel4EU
We’re working on advancing European language engines for borderless business communication. Create Europe’s Translation Layer, specifically, by enabling seamless human-quality translation between any pairing of the 24 official languages of the EU in different content types such as Email, Chat and Listings (P2020 Co-Funded Project).
OpenKiwi
Quality estimation (QE) is one of the challenges in MT: it evaluates a system’s quality without access to reference translations. We released OpenKiwi, a PyTorch-based open-source framework that implements the best QE systems from WMT 2015-18 shared tasks. The accompanying paper won the best system paper at ACL 2019.
APE-QUEST
Setting up a quality gate and crowdsourcing workflow to improve translation quality in specific domains. Boost CEF eTranslation with Automated Post-Editing (APE) & Quality Estimation (QE) for Electronic Exchange of Social Security Information (EESSI) and Online Dispute Resolution (ODR) DSIs and related national services (H2020 Co-Funded Project).
INTERACT - International Network On Crisis Translation
Timely and accurate communication is essential for crisis management, but what if the only information available to you is in a language you cannot understand? Created to answer the need for quality translation in health-crisis scenarios, INTERACT is an interdisciplinary European project.
Unbabel Scribe
Transcription can be a big piece of translation flows, especially when it comes to audiovisual content. This project aims to research & develop a technical solution for automatic transcription and translation of audiovisual content by leveraging a community of human translators (P2020 Co-Funded Project).
DeepSPIN
Deep learning is revolutionizing the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP), with breakthroughs in machine translation, speech recognition, and question answering. New language interfaces (digital assistants, messenger apps, customer service bots) are emerging as the next technologies for seamless, multilingual communication among humans and machines.
Most Innovative Company
2017, 2015
Best Global Machine Translation Quality Estimation System
2019, 2016
Blending Human & Artificial Intelligence, in partnership with Concentrix, UK
2019
CBInsights AI List of Most Innovative Artificial Intelligence Startups for Disruptive Technology of the Year
2019
Want to do research with us?
Our AI team is growing — and we’re looking for candidates with unique skills and stories.