The 42nd Annual Meeting of the German Linguistic Society (DGfS) will take place from 04 to 06 March 2020 in Hamburg, Germany. The convention is hosted by the managing director of Hamburg University’s Institute of German Studies Prof. Heike Zinsmeister, PhD. We feel honoured to support this event as an official sponsor. The conference’s focus topic this year is Linguistic Diversity: Theories, Methods, Resources.

With LangTec meeting all formal requirements (1. Owner-managed, 2. Company located in Hamburg, 3. More than 10 employees) we now are an official member of the Hamburg Software Alliance (SAH). The SAH represents Hamburg’s small and medium-sized businesses in IT systems development. The SAH unites individual strengths with the full service portfolio of the more than 70 alliance partners into a uniquely positioned alliance.

Yet another legendary LangTec Christmas Party. 10 ice stocks, countless mulled wines and much sportive competitiveness were on site. Subsequently, chèf extraordinaire Arthur Richelmann treated us to an amazing French dinner with equally fabulous French red wine in his wonderful little restaurant Williamine.
Season’s greeting, everyone!

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!