Raphaël Merx
I'm a PhD student in Machine Learning at the University of Melbourne, and a Technical Lead at Catalpa International. I got into ML through my side project tetun.org (read more in our paper).
Previously, I worked in technology for the aid sector at Catalpa, in various positions (backend eng / full-stack / technical product manager / head of governance and transparency). I started my career at Captricity in California.
I'm passionate about making tech accessible, useful, and pleasant to use. I believe this starts with listening.
Publications
05/2025
Merx, R., Correia, A. J. G., Suominen, H. & Vylomova, E.
Eighth Workshop on Technologies for Machine Translation of Low-Resource Languages (LoResMT 2025) @ NAACL
12/2024
Merx, R., Vylomova, E. & Kurniawan, K.
22nd Annual Workshop of the Australasian Language Technology Association (Association for Computational Linguistics, Canberra, Australia, 2024)Best Paper Award
08/2024
Merx, R., Phillips, C. & Suominen, H.
in Health. Innovation. Community: It Starts With Us 78–83 (IOS Press, 2024). doi:10.3233/SHTI240895
03/2024
Merx, R., Mahmudi, A., Langford, K., de Araujo, L. A. & Vylomova, E.
in Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Resources and Technologies for Indigenous, Endangered and Lesser-resourced Languages in Eurasia (EURALI) @ LREC-COLING 2024 (eds. Ojha, A. Kr. et al.) 1–11 (ELRA and ICCL, Torino, Italia, 2024)
Work Experience
07/2022 - present
Catalpa International, Papua New Guinea
Leading product development for a governance platform used across the Government of Papua New Guinea to report on government expenditures.
07/2020 - 07/2022
Head of Governance and Transparency
Catalpa International, Indonesia
Managed a portfolio of 4 programs across 3 different countries worth US$2.2m a year in donor funding.
07/2019 - 07/2020
Team Leader, Project Bank Portal
Catalpa International, Timor-Leste
Led project management and technical implementation for the Project Bank portal, a transparency coordination portal for major investment projects in Myanmar.
02/2018 - 07/2019
Technical Lead, Hamutuk Project
Catalpa International, Timor-Leste
Led a team of engineers building a mobile application and web platform used by over 20 NGOs and Government Ministries in Timor-Leste.
06/2016 - 02/2018
Software Developer
Catalpa International, Timor-Leste
Back and front-end engineering for development projects in Timor-Leste and Myanmar.
06/2014 - 06/2016
Software Engineer
Captricity, Oakland, USA
Worked on all technical aspects of a platform used to extract handwritten information from images of paper forms at 99.9% accuracy.
Projects
2025
A RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) question-answering system that provides
responses backed by reports from the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT).
2020-present
An online dictionary and translation tool for Tetun, the national language of Timor-Leste.
Includes machine translation, dictionary with examples, spell checker, etc. Built with the help of many linguists and friends.
2020-present
A financial transparency and governance tool for local governments in Papua New Guinea, by Catalpa International.
2022
A version of the popular word game Wordle adapted for Tetun.
2022
A frontend for NLLB that focuses on Indonesian languages.
Timeline
- Published a Paper
Machine Translation (MT) Technology in Health: A Scoping Review
Where does MT show promise in health contexts? Where is it too risky? And are its uses well understood? (spoiler alert: not really) - New Project update
Started a PhD @ University of Melbourne
Machine translation; low-resource; health education; and LLMs. Supervised by Ekaterina Vylomova, Nick Thieberger and Hanna Suominen - Spoke at an Event
Instituto Nacional de Linguística Seminar, 2024
Presentation “Oportunidade no dezafiu tradusaun automatika iha lian Tetun” (“Opportunities and challenges for machine translation in Tetun”) at the annual seminar for the Timor-Leste National Institute of Linguistics. - Published a Paper
Low-Resource Machine Translation through Retrieval-Augmented LLM Prompting: A Study on the Mambai Language
Can LLMs (like ChatGPT) learn to translate into Mambai, if given relevant examples? Answer: somewhat if examples are very close to the sentence to translate, otherwise not really. Paper accepted by EURALI. - Spoke at an Event
Asia-Pacific Medical Education Conference 2024
Preliminary findings from a scoping review on machine translation for health, as part of a symposium "AI, Medicine and Medical Education in Resource-Constrained Settings", organised by Dr Lois Hong, Maluk Timor clinical director. - New Project update
tetun.org: more languages, more users
Added Indonesian, Portuguese, and even Tok Pisin (in beta) to tetun.org! Also passed 60,000 monthly active users. - New Project update
Q&A on DFAT reports, powered by AI
Think chatGPT, but backed by hundreds of reports, and citing its sources. Reports from the DFAT (Australian Dept of Foreign Affairs) website - Spoke at an Event
A 3-min pitch on why jargon in aid is worse than we think
Went to beautiful Canberra for the 2022 Australasian Aid Conf, and made a small pitch about why jargon is worse than an annoyance, and why overusing it makes us no better than AIs. - Spoke at an Event
Talk about machine translation for Tok Pisin at the LSPNG conference
Presented my work on machine translation, with a first translator prototype for Tok Pisin at https://tok-pisin.org, at the Linguistic Society of PNG 2022 conference. - New Project update
Regional indonesian language translator
A translator between Indonesian and several regional languages of Indonesia: Javanese, Sundanese, Balinese, Acehnese, Banjarese, Buginese, and the Minangkabau language. - New Project update
Tetun Wordle
A Wordle all in Tetun, forked from the Indonesian Wordle, Katla. Been told it's the first word game using Tetun? Thanks to Adérito Correia (INL) for reviewing my Tetun instructions. - New Project update
Balinese spell checker
A webapp to fix Balinese text spelling, built in partnership with the Balinese Wikisource (WikiPustaka) community. Useful to fix text transliterated from the Balinese alphabet to the Latin alphabet. - Wrote a Blog Post
Agile, meet adaptive: How global development assistance and software engineering both thrive on an iterative approach
I believe in iteration (and perseverance) in both software engineering and development assistance. Written for the Catalpa blog. - Spoke at an Event
PyconAU talk on the tetun.org machine translator
Mel Mistica and I presented on how we setup a volunteer-led English-Tetun machine translation service. Since then we passed 25,000 monthly active users. - Wrote a Blog Post
Beyond Compliance: Approaching government transparency as an Opportunity rather than an Obligation
Finding alignment of incentives between decision makers, data officers and citizens can make or break the success of transparency projects. - New Project update
Added machine translation to tetun.org
What started as a Tetun-English dictionary now includes a translator, using a machine learning model for translation. - New Project update
Published an iOS version of tetun.org
Over the first few months of the pandemic, I taught myself React Native and migrated the tetun.org app to it. This let me generate an iOS build which was published to the Apple App Store.