Government of Korea provides funding for a Korean-Filipino translation project

PH | Government of Korea provides funding for a Korean-Filipino translation project | MANILA – A language project that will create a corpus of data to teach artificial intelligence (AI) to faithfully translate Korean into Philippine Tagalog is being funded by the government of Korea.

The National Institute of the Korean Language is providing funding for the initiative, which will also create corpora for seven additional foreign languages.

The corpus project seeks to fill gaps in Korean-Filipino language study as well as contribute to the creation of an automatic translation engine.

Because Filipinos speak Filipino languages, English cannot replace Filipino. We decided on Tagalog because there is already a wealth of information about the English language, so we are looking at other languages that are also more pertinent to Korean society, said Kyungmin Bae, director of the University of the Philippines Korea Research Centre (UP KRC) and leader of the project review team, in an interview on Tuesday evening.

Users can translate words between languages using corpora, which are collections of real language data that can be used to train AI or translation engines.

This implies that translation quality increases with data collection volume.

Despite the fact that there are millions of speakers of Philippine Tagalog throughout the world, there is a dearth of translation corpus data for the language, making it challenging to anticipate accurate translations from automatic translation.

The Korean-Foreign Language Parallel Corpus Project’s first phase, which started in 2021, produced a parallel corpus of eight million words that were translated from Korean into Vietnamese, Thai, Indian Hindi, Cambodian, Russian, and Uzbek.

The second phase increased the scope of construction data to create a parallel corpus of 10 million words, and the third phase, which runs from May to December 2023, is now creating 11.04 million words.

Two research papers from the University of the Philippines that were published in KCI (Korea Citation Index) journals used the corpus data from phase one, which is currently freely available to the public at https://corpus.korean.go.kr/request/reausetMain.do?lang=en.

The programme is in accordance with the goal of the Korean government to advance commercial, cultural, and interpersonal ties with the Philippines as the two countries celebrate their 75th anniversary of diplomatic relations in 2024.

Professor Jung Hee Lee of Kyung Hee University, the project’s convenor, believes that the programme will eventually help reduce the cultural gap between the Philippines and Korea while fostering more economic ties.

In addition to the academic community, the programme sees industries gaining from the precise translations that enable them to create manuals for their businesses — a timely development as the number of South Korean companies doing business in the Philippines is also anticipated to increase as the two states finalise a bilateral trade agreement.

From September 3 to September 6, Lee travelled to the Philippines alongside Dr. Ji Yeon Jeon, a Tagalog researcher for the Kangwon National University’s NIKL Korean-Foreign Language Parallel Corpus Project, to evaluate the program’s development and connect with Filipino colleagues.

Additionally, they delivered a lecture at the UP Department of Linguistics, paid courtesy calls to the UP Sentro ng Wikang Filipino, the UP Office of the Chancellor, and the Komisyon sa Wikang Filipino, and discussed ways to collaborate with other linguists from various fields to advance the Philippine Tagalog corpus.

Dr. Aldrin Lee and Kyungmin Bae, professors in the UP Department of Linguistics, are in charge of the project’s supervision on the Philippine side.(via PNA)