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It was an exciting day for a group of high-school students at Nawamintrachinee Mae Hong Son Industrial and Community Education College as they experienced something they had never seen before.

Living in a remote area, the children had the chance to enjoy a modern class where their learning was no longer limited to the class, but open to the world. The teacher, meanwhile, was able to conduct a lesson for not only local students but also other children thousands of miles away.

The college is the first pilot site for Thai Computational Linguistics Laboratory (TCL), a Thailand-based research unit under the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology in Japan to conduct an experiment in utilising technology to deliver distance learning to Thai and Japanese students remotely.

As the project was conducted between high-school students in Mae Hong Son and Kyoto, Japan, which uses a different language, a key technology adopted for the experiment was not only high-speed Internet and video conferencing but also machine translation (MT), a technology that eliminates the language barrier.

MT is a computer software technology to translate text or speech from one language to another automatically and for this project, a research team at TCL developed MT technology to facilitate automatic text translation between Thai and Japanese languages.

The project was conducted as part of the National Electronics and Computer Technology Centre (Nectec)'s IT Valley Project.

During a cold morning in early February, a team from TCL and Nectec went deep into the valley to set up a system to conduct real-time distance learning, linking the two countries' students together. Video cameras, an editing system, computers and software technology as well as an Internet connection were prepared to turn the college's traditional classroom into a modern one.

Despite having prepared the project for months, the team still felt nervous on the day of the experiment. Virach Sornlertlamvanich, the co-director at TCL who initiated the experimental project, admitted that it was really exciting and challenging for his team to ensure everything went smoothly.

"We faced many problems during the setting-up process, especially the Internet connection. As the connection to Higashiuji High School in Kyoto was blocked for security purposes, we could not make a direct connection so we had to find ways to re-route the signal to make the link work smoothly," Virach said.

At 11am, the distance-learning class started on the Thailand side with a 25-minute lesson about Thai Yai traditional costumes and a costume showcase. The class then came back after lunch with Kyoto's Higashiuji High School talking about the historic city of Kyoto, with a traditional Japanese dance show.

During the class, children from both schools paid attention to the lesson and they later had a chance to greet, talk and discuss interactively between the countries, without any language barrier.

"They understood each other well and this was a key part of our experiment," Virach said. "To remove the language problem, our machine-translation technology helped them understand each other's comments even though they talked in different languages."

While the teacher taught the class in Mae Hong Son, every word was typed into a computer system and then sent to TCL's machine-translation server at Thailand Science Park in Pathum Thani province for automatic translation.

The translated text was then sent back and incorporated into a video real-time broadcast, which was shown with Japanese subtitles. This allowed the students with two different languages to better understand the lessons.

Virach said the system also worked similarly on the Japanese side.

The system translated Japanese text into Thai and the students in Mae Hong Son were able to understand what the Japanese students were talking about from the Thai subtitles. "The translation loop took only a few seconds so all the content was translated in real time," Virach said.

The integration of new technology into a teaching and learning system really excited Aroon Norasih, the college's teacher who has more than three decades of teaching experience. As the conductor of the first distance-learning class in this project, she said the technology opened up a whole new world for her students to get in touch with the outside world.

"It's really exciting to have this kind of teaching and learning system. We can see the children were more enthusiastic to learn new things as they could see many things which were far away from them," she said.

The teacher realised that the new technology really helped her students, who were mostly hilltribe people, to meet new friends in another country. "They shared new ideas and culture and this stimulated their learning system," she said.

After the class, students from the two sides enjoyed asking questions of each other. They greeted their new friends, asked and answered questions and laughed together even though they were separated by thousands of kilometres.

"It was a really good experience for me," a young girl said after the class. "I could see new friends from Japan and understand their culture. It was very exciting and great fun."

For Virach, even though the experimental project worked out fine for teachers, students and the project team, as the technology translated to and from Thai and Japanese language correctly, he saw there could be more development of machine-translation technology if it was to be adopted for use in real distance learning.

"This experimental project was the first step to show practical use of the lab's MT technology. We hope it can be integrated with mass applications," he said.

After this test, Virach plans to integrate the machine translation technology with instant messaging and e-mail applications to help people talk and understand other languages more easily.

"We hope that a plug-in version of Thai-Japanese machine translation, which can be used with the two applications, will come out by the end of this year," he said.

Virach's ultimate goal is to integrate his machine translation with speech technology, so instead of needing people to type spoken sentences into text for translation, the machine would be able to convert speech into text and then translate what people are saying into another language instantly. This system would be more appropriate for use with distance learning, he said.

 

Pongpen Sutharoj

The Nation