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Conferences for a Cause - Twenty Years of TAUS Events

The evolution of the language industry over the past two decades includes a transition from rule-based Machine Translation to the integration of AI. Learn more about how two industries converge at the TAUS conferences in Rome and Albuquerque this year.

Technology looking for users

In 2004, TAUS held its first conference in San Francisco, for a very good reason: we wanted to introduce Machine Translation technology into the real world of business users. Therefore we brought big-tech companies and enterprises together for a foundational meeting. Remember, this was two years before Google Translate came out!

 

Moments of change

What prompted the TAUS agenda ever since that inaugural moment was the trigger of technology and innovation. At the beginning it was the breakthrough of statistical MT and the break with the stagnating developments of rule-based MT. The Moses open-source SMT movement in 2004 and 2005 marked the beginning of TAUS. Soon thereafter - in 2008 - we invited our main stakeholders to convene in Taos (New Mexico) for the launch of the TAUS Data Cloud: an industry-shared repository of language data. To help establish a more receptive environment for automated translation TAUS co-developed and launched the DQF/MQM quality metrics in 2012, which is now widely adopted in the global translation industry. The jump in quality of Neural MT in 2016 made the TAUS team realize that it was time to develop its own solutions. We started our transformation from a think tank to a data and software company. Today we offer Data for AI, NLP Consulting, LLM Evaluation and the Estimate API for Quality Estimation.

 

TAUS 2024 Conferences

Throughout the years, since the first event in 2004, TAUS organized conferences to facilitate and stimulate change. Now, twenty years and some hundred events later we do it again: but this time we want to introduce AI into the real world of business users. Therefore we bring the language industry, AI labs and enterprises together at the Massively Multilingual AI Conferences in Rome (June) and Albuquerque (October).

 

Marriage between AI and the language industry

AI needs the language industry and the language industry needs AI. A marriage between the two is the main focus of the TAUS conferences in 2024. Enterprises present at the events will be their witnesses and testify what their real needs are in the years to come. This way we move the agenda forward, pave the way for accelerated adoption of AI, new applications and, not to forget: a more fair, balanced use of AI in a multilingual world.

 

Value for money

TAUS conferences are not your typical trade shows with people popping in and out to show their faces. TAUS events are known for their integrated programs and the intimate format, where everyone is engaged in the discussions from beginning to end. Common goals are set and long-term partnerships are forged during the two-and-a-half days of plenary sessions, lunches and dinners.

Check out the program.
Register here.

 

Author
jaap-van-der-meer

Jaap van der Meer founded TAUS in 2004. He is a language industry pioneer and visionary, who started his first translation company, INK, in The Netherlands in 1980. Jaap is a regular speaker at conferences and author of many articles about technologies, translation and globalization trends.

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