Technology and women’s empowerment: women-led AI

Technology and women’s empowerment are two of the cornerstones of our company mission. They are also the guiding principles behind Assolombarda’s STEAMiamoci initiative. This includes our big data and neural network-based Term4neural project in the gallery of best business practices published online.

Assolombarda’s STEAMiamoci initiative was created in November 2016 to promote inclusion of women in culture and production, reducing the gap between women and men in the workplace, and encouraging female participation in STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics) fields. This process of cultural promotion cannot disregard “A” for “art”, an expressive element of creativity and innovation in science.

With its widespread local coverage, the business community is the ideal environment for fostering and integrating female talent in the technological evolution and digital transformation – a highly topical issue linked to the national Industry 4.0 plan.

Aware of this, Assolombarda has launched the STEAMiamoci project, networking with companies as enablers of social sustainability, starting in Lombardy and rapidly expanding to all of Italy and beyond.

Women’s empowerment and technology are the bedrocks of Way2Global, a certified “società benefit” and B Corp. This is why we decided to work with Assolombarda and other companies, sharing our female inclusion project to promote cultural change in technological innovation and artificial intelligence.

Term4Neural — big data and neural networks

Way2Global has always focused on technological innovation and digital transformation that fosters change in the language industry’s social impact — with mutual benefit to professionals and the community of linguists.

For years we have played a leading role in the City of Milan’s local #STEMintheCItyinitiative. As a technological incubator, in collaboration with the Civica Scuola Altiero Spinelli, we have organized conferences focused on our exclusive Language Industry 4.0 project.

Now more than ever, the digital transformation and the advent of artificial intelligence must be harnessed to empower women. As part of Language Industry 4.0 and our work to develop cutting-edge technologies for the fourth industrial revolution in the localization industry, we came up with the Term4Neural project in May 2019.

This ambitious research project resulted from a meeting between Arianna, Flavia and Silvia, three recent young graduates driven by a nerdy passion for languages and AI applied to terminological taxonomy. We have supported their professional growth and ambition to train as data scientists, and develop a verticalized terminology database, a proprietary data-driven tool that integrates big data into machine translation engines based on deep learning and neural networks.

Term4Neural is a tool seamlessly integrated into the workplace, facilitating the work of linguists and helping to ensure the quality, appropriateness and consistency of terminology in the translation process.

It is a wonderful story of a union between women and technology. With a women-driven, data-centric R&S project, this union has enabled us to process 12 million words through terminology extraction, to train and empower 20 female linguists in the use of Neural Machine Translation (NMT), to produce over 2 million translated words, and to turn three young female talents into data scientists.

We are delighted to have taken on yet another challenging endeavor in line with our key principles of Open Innovation, Technology Transfer and Capacity Building, raising the bar for technology while positively impacting society and promoting women’s empowerment. We are also pleased to have implemented our project in partnership with STEAMiamoci.