Mark Seligman

The book’s Preface places the current AI explosion in the context of other technological cataclysms and recounts the author’s personal (and not always deadly serious) AI journey. Chapter One (“Extracting the Essence”) assesses the potential of machine translation of literature, exploiting Vladimir Nabokov’s hyperconscious literary art as a reference point. Chapter Two (“Toward an Artificial Nabokov”) goes on to speculate on possibilities for actual artificial creation of literature. Chapter Three (“Large Literary Models? Intelligence and Language in the LLM Era”) explains recent spectacular progress in Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI), as exemplified by Large Language Models like ChatGPT. On the way, the chapter ventures to tackle perennial questions (“What is intelligence?” “What is language?”) and culminates in an assortment of striking demos. The volume’s Sendoff considers whether machines, while now arguably intelligent, can ever also gain sufficient sensation and emotion to create language art with other than borrowed depth – and, while viewing this development as likely all too soon, declines to despair on that account.

The book’s Preface places the current AI explosion in the context of other technological cataclysms and recounts the author’s personal (and not always deadly serious) AI journey. Chapter One (“Extracting the Essence”) assesses the potential of machine translation of literature, exploiting Vladimir Nabokov’s hyperconscious literary art as a reference point. Chapter Two (“Toward an Artificial Nabokov”) goes on to speculate on possibilities for actual artificial creation of literature. Chapter Three (“Large Literary Models? Intelligence and Language in the LLM Era”) explains recent spectacular progress in Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI), as exemplified by Large Language Models like ChatGPT. On the way, the chapter ventures to tackle perennial questions (“What is intelligence?” “What is language?”) and culminates in an assortment of striking demos. The volume’s Sendoff considers whether machines, while now arguably intelligent, can ever also gain sufficient sensation and emotion to create language art with other than borrowed depth – and, while viewing this development as likely all too soon, declines to despair on that account.

Digital health translation is an important application of machine translation and multilingual technologies, and there is a growing need for accessibility in digital health translation design for disadvantaged communities. This book addresses that need by highlighting state-of-the-art research on the design and evaluation of assistive translation tools, along with systems to facilitate cross-cultural and cross-lingual communications in health and medical settings. Using case studies as examples, the principles of designing assistive health communication tools are illustrated. These are (1) detectability of errors to boost user confidence by health professionals; (2) customizability for health and medical domains; (3) inclusivity of translation modalities to serve people with disabilities; and (4) equality of accessibility standards for localised multilingual websites of health contents. This book will appeal to readers from natural language processing, computer science, linguistics, translation studies, public health, media, and communication studies. This title is available as open access on Cambridge Core.