Balashov Awarded NSF Grant

UGA Philosophy professor Yuri Balashov has received an NSF grant in the amount of $136,969 to support his interdisciplinary project exploring cognitive, linguistic, and philosophical aspects of human and machine translation. Building on prior work, this project brings educational and research tools illustrating the complex interaction of human and machine translation to the attention of students and practitioners, including those with limited or no computer science background. 

In the spirit of making AI more transparent and explainable, the project supports recent efforts aimed at increasing machine translation literacy. Firmly grounded in relevant data and practices, Balashov's research is a bottom-up case study of the history and current state of translation technologies conducted from the complementary perspectives of multiple disciplines and informed by first-hand knowledge of human and machine translation.

Connecting technical developments in a cutting-edge area of AI with important debates in philosophy of language, linguistics, and cognitive science, the project will raise awareness among scholars working in those areas, stimulating new ways of thinking about traditional problems. It will also raise awareness of the broader theoretical issues among machine translation researchers, professional translators, and translation scholars, thus serving as a much-needed bridge between two rather isolated communities.