Kwangwoon University held ‘The 4th National University Student Machine Translation Contest’ and ‘2021 Saltlux Partners Hackathon Contest’

Kwangwoon University held the 4^th National University Student Machine Translation Contest Awards on the 18^th, Tuesday. The contest was held as a part of the College Innovation Project of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, hosted by the Department of English Language and Industry, sponsored by AI Translation Industry Research Center and language service companies Evertran, Salftux Partners and Flitto.

The software used in the competition is a VisualTran Mate translation solution program developed by Evertran Co., Ltd. It is a program introduced and used by the Korean Legal Information Service for legal translation. In the test, the questions prepared in advance for 100 minutes were presented with a Korean-English and English-Korean draft translation by the program, and each sentence was compared with the original text and submitted after proofreading. The translation was evaluated by four judges based on adequacy and readability.

About 50 students from Kwangwoon University, Dongguk University, Sungshin Women's University, Korea Military Academy and Incheon University participated in this competition. The grand prize winners were Yoo Seong-hyeon (Kwangwoon University), the Excellence Award: Kim Jeong-jung (Kwangwoon University), Song Ye-rim (Kwangwoon University), and the Encouragement Award: Kim Young-hyun (Kwangwoon University), Kim Eui-jin (Kwangwoon University), and Lee Ye-rin (Kwangwoon University). Saltlux Partners Co., Ltd. Grand Prize: Park Young-eun (Korea Military Academy), Flitto Co., Ltd. Excellence Award: Moon Soo-bin (Korea Military Academy) and Kang Hyeon-seon (Korea Military Academy), Evertran Co., Ltd. Encouragement Award: Lee Yeon-ji (Sungshin Women's University), Jin Yu-ri (Incheon University), Lee Gyeong-ju (Korea Military Academy) student won the award.

Lee Il-jae, head of Kwangwoon University’s AI Translation Industry Research Center (Professor of English Language and Industry), said, “The future of education has been foggy due to the coronavirus, but in the end, the humanities and engineering promote convergence industry-university cooperation, and non-face-to-face language ability evaluation that was only imaginable in the pre-COVID era. It was the opportunity to complete the program and protocol. It will be another starting point that has an important meaning in the new normal university education.”

Lee Cheong-ho, CEO of Evertran Co., Ltd. (Adjunct professor at Kwangwoon University), who has been leading the development of various translation platform software in Korea for the past 20 years, said, “The era of the 4th industrial revolution is coming, and the humanities are said to be a study on the brink of a cliff. However, if you look around and gather ideas, you will find a new way that you never thought possible. Translation is now becoming the basis of global communication when it becomes a global industry scale.”

In addition, the '2021 Saltlux Partners Hackathon Contest' was held on the 18th (Tuesday). It was hosted by the AI Translation Industry Research Center (CEO Lee Il-jae) and Saltlux Partners Co., Ltd. (CEO Kim Young-taek), a central language data and service company in Korea.

As part of the government's digital new deal policy in 2021, the Hackathon competition will be held as an extension of the AI learning data project conducted by the Korea Intelligent Information Society Agency (NIA). Currently, Saltlux Partners (Co., Ltd.) is building AI learning data in six multilingual languages (Korean vs. French, Spanish, German, Japanese and Chinese) for "overseas sales" and "daily life" areas under its "data dam" project. The purpose of this hackathon competition was to use this learning data to propose AI services or AI business models that have business feasibility, originality, and potential for development.

Several teams from all over the country participated in the competition, and among them, Mechaverse, a team belonging to the Department of Mechanical Systems at Sookmyung Women's University (Park Ye-won, Kim Jeong-ha, Lee Ja-eun, Jung Moon-kyung) won the grand prize and 3 million won in prize. The Excellence Award and prize money of 1 million won were awarded to AIAAS (Lee Jae-won, team leader and Bang Seong-jin), a team affiliated with Kwangwoon University's Department of Software and Artificial Intelligence Applied Department, and the Encouragement Award was awarded to a team belonging to Korea University's Department of Software Convergence and Chung-Ang University's Department of Library and Information Science, Team Rest (Lee Ji-hyun, including Team Leader Jeon, Chae-won) and Kwangwoon University (Department of Psychology, Department of Tourism Business, Suwon Science University, Department of Convergence Medical Science, Kyunghee University, and Department of Computer Science, Gachon University, Hear Your Voice (Park Kyung-tae, Kang Min-jae, Seo Yu-ri, and Lee Sang-hyeop) won the awards.

Lee Il-jae, head of the AI Translation Industry Research Center at Kwangwoon University (Professor of the Department of English Language and Industry) said, “This hackathon was a competition between the humanities and engineering fields for creative and convergence ideas. It was a wonderful competition that responds to the direction of the government, industry, and universities that need to nurture leaders with a convergent and creative mind.”

CEO Kim Young-taek said, “It was a meaningful contest to confirm the practicality and potential of public data constructed in the data dam project promoted by the government, and to inform society, businesses and universities about the direction of the government’s science and technology development. We hope that this competition will serve as an opportunity to further nurture language-based AI talents in universities and societies.”