If Jackie Lo had her way, nothing would ever be lost in translation.
The research officer with the NRC's Digital Technologies Research Centre uses her skills in machine translation, natural language processing and artificial intelligence technologies to demonstrate Canada's expertise in machine learning.
When Jackie first joined the NRC in 2015, she immediately exceeded expectations by delivering a functional Somali to English machine translation tool when only a feasibility study was required. Not surprisingly, a number of successive accomplishments would follow.
Jackie consistently ranks in the top five at international technology evaluation competitions, is an important contributor to PORTAGE, the NRC's machine translation software and is the brains behind YiSi, an open-source technology that acts like a machine translation teacher to catch errors in meaning.
Jackie led the NRC to first place wins at the 2016 and 2017 Russian-English machine translation competitions. At the third Conference on Machine Translation in 2018, Jackie's YiSi metric finished or tied in first place on the machine translation evaluation tasks in nearly all the tested language directions. At the same event, she led the NRC to a top 5 finish for bilingual corpus cleaning/filtering, alongside industry giants Microsoft and Alibaba.
"I enjoy the creativity and freedom of working on language technology projects. I am proud of this work because it helps people around the world to better understand each other. The ability to learn and master languages to convey complex ideas is one of the key differences between humans and animals".
Jackie's colleagues cite her enthusiasm, mastery of scientific and technical concepts, and positive, collaborative spirit as being important parts of her contributions to the NRC.