2019 was an exciting year, with more and more challenges, integrations and developments in the language technology space. We witnessed the rise, rise and further rise of Neural Machine Translation. Covid-19 has changed many plans and disrupted business in 2020 - but we don't stop at Pangeanic.
After putting in place a pre-Covid contingency plan, all operations were moved home. In general, the pandemic appears to have been an opportunity for digital data companies. Those who have adapted, or knew how to adapt, have made use of the technology as much as possible.
Digital signatures, videoconferencing were here to stay since the earlier part of the 2000's. In our field, machine translation has been the star protagonist. Some studies point to our society becoming more digital in 3 months of confinement than in the last 5 years.
At Pangeanic, we embraced Natural Language Processing long ago as our natural evolution. This has given us the opportunity to create the next generation language company, focused on how Artificial Intelligence can extract value, transfer knowledge, structure unstructured information, anonymize content, and more. Usage of our machine translation platform PangeaMT has almost doubled since January. Adaptive father-child MT engine retraining has become the most popular choice.
From our perspective at Pangeanic, neural deep networks were the game-changing development which led to a new world of opportunities. New industries have adopted machine translation: from legaltech to cognitive industries, academic publishing, medical devices and more. Since 2017, we have seen new use cases and what used to be challenging language pairs produce high quality MT.
We are talking about cracking language barriers any longer, but about really effective performance. We need to evaluate the performance of engines created for Public Administrations with typical data as part of our NTEU project. Amazingly, early results show that some language testers prefer the output of the specialist MT engine to the original reference translation, which they class sometimes as "too free".
A consequence of this is that we need to grow our team to meet the demand - particularly in the area of sales and marketing - across our legal and enterprise solutions.
The first step on this path is to begin to expand our team into the US. We'll be looking to bring on-board a Business Development Manager and sales personnel to our US offices in September based in the Miami area to help drive this forward. Maybe I'm biased, but artificial intelligence is a great and exciting opportunity for digital data companies to help users adopt really cutting-edge technology.
We are convinced AI-enhanced NLP will become a core function rather being the "add-on" that machine translation used to be in the past. Experienced sales personnel looking for challenges will understand how exciting selling technology is. And yes, they can be part of the next data revolution!
The job specification will open in our Careers section in the next weeks. If this is you, and you're interested in riding this wave, helping us grow, and working with technology, let's talk. Or if you know someone who you think fits the bill, please put them in touch. Stay tuned as in the coming weeks as we'll be opening a few more roles.... particularly in our new offices in Florida from September! Onwards and upwards!