[GALA Valencia 2024] Beyond the Binary: Making Machine Translation Inclusive

In 2023 Electronic Arts took a long look at how they could make their machine translations more inclusive and above all less binary. Even more so now as AI continues to be in the spotlight and considered a new way of working more efficiently. However, even with these advances and increased efficiency they were still left with the same challenges when it comes to inclusion; limited data sets.

The data sets being used continued to exclude large parts of society, whether that be women, racialized people or non-binary folk. In this session Amanda Hawthorne focused on the non-binary exclusion in particular and the ideas Electronic Arts had to overcome this lack of inclusion in AI. They considered different options of how to include non-binary translations and in the end the most viable option was: "We’ll do it ourselves!"

Amanda and her colleagues then set about creating their own data sets, to facilitate non-binary language training internally. It was a massive task, which needed the collaboration of many teams and detailed planning.

Did they make huge steps towards ending in-house binary machine translations? Yes. Have they still got more work to do? Also yes. In this session Amanda discussed how Electronic Arts went about training their machines to stop being binary, specifically:

-how they curated data sets

-people involved in the process

-the essential tools they used

-the challenges they faced and how they overcame them

-learning points for future inclusive machine learning

Host organization: Globalization and Localization Association