BSC-CNS researcher Marta Villegas presents the development of the project in an informative talk for the general public
The Aina project, developed at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), aims to develop artificial intelligence (AI) resources and language technologies (TL) in order to provide Catalan with the necessary infrastructure to develop applications based on AI and TL. This is what Marta Villegas (BSC), principal researcher of this project, explained last Thursday, November 23, in one of the sessions being held by the Contemporary Culture Center of Barcelona (CCCB) as part of the “AI: Artificial Intelligence” exhibition.
The Aina project aims to ensure that the inclusion of Catalan in AI and TL applications is profitable and attractive for companies in the sector , promoting this sector in Catalonia and ensuring that the citizen can participate in Catalan in the digital world at the same level as the speakers of a global language. Language technology is therefore a protagonist in big data and it is necessary to make Catalan language models available to the scientific community and industry, pre-trained on large amounts of quality linguistic data.
In this sense, Marta Villegas emphasized that “Catalan is the first language in Common Voice above English, thanks to the campaign carried out in the framework of Aina to record voices in Catalan”; during the last two years, “we have achieved 35 billion words in Catalan“, emphasized Villegas. The Aina Project continues to work on these models, in constant evolution, and betting on the presence of Catalan in the AI.
