Q: Could you enlighten us on the advantages of the AI hostess? What're the differences with a human sign language interpreter? Why such an AI-supported TV anchor was chosen for the upcoming Winter Olympics?

Yuan: I think the AI TV anchor could help with the continuous translation for the long texts, and ensure the least loss of the information.

Researches indicate and sign language users also conclude that human sign language interpreters can lose some information.

But the AI robots backed with our database can overcome this major barrier.

Statistics indicated that within special scenarios, the correct rate of sign language recognition could top 97 percent while the correct rate of sign language generation could be even higher.

The CCTV announced in November 2021 that it hoped to use the AI anchor in its TV broadcast.

In a bid to learn the particular journalism language, we studied the TV sign language anchor at the program Common Interest.

We teamed up with CCTV to broadcast on its app. It received widespread recognition, so that CCTV hoped to promote the AI anchor during the Winter Olympics on its app again.

We also upgraded our database with the Winter Olympics' particular scenarios.

The database is ever upgrading.

Q: As far as we know, your college has revealed an ambitious target that it will expand the corpus to 1 million pieces of data and after the Winter Olympics, the research team expects the technology could better serve medical and transportation areas. Is this information correct?

Yuan: Yes. We expect that it could help the deaf in their shopping, transportation and other aspects of daily life.

For example, during the fifth World Intelligence Congress in Tianjin last year, many visitors were attracted by our exhibitions…some indicated they expected to apply the technology in shopping malls.

The application during the live broadcast of the Winter Olympics is by no means the only target that we are pursuing.

Because we are the teachers of the group at the college, we have profound insights on the people's demand and we will never cease our efforts.

Some research institutions could promote their results very fast, but we are not of that kind…in fact, we need much more time to obtain results.

Q: Are there any similar research results in Western countries? Are there any advantages and disadvantages that your team's research has?

Yuan: I think the CV (computer vision) plus NLP (natural language processing) area is among the hottest ones in global research circle.

Amid the fourth industrial revolution, AI-supported language recognition has seen rapid development.

We all hope the AI technologies we are developing could work 24/7 to help the people who need help, for whom the AI development is shaping a new future.

Compared with the Western countries, our technologies still lag behind and have a funding shortage.

However, we have greater dedications to people in need.

We now have a team of 200-300 members to help the Winter Olympics project in the sentence transformation between the languages and in the future we expect the member could rise.

Our computing science team is composed of up to 50 members from our own college and the computing science college at our university. They are devoted to the aid for the people.

We also expect more companies to join our forces to support disabled people.