Raphaël Merx

A software engineer turned aid worker. Tech, languages, governance, in no particular (world) order

  • New Project update
    Started a PhD @ University of Melbourne
    Will be researching AI (in particular machine translation) for health education in low-resource contexts, 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.
  • New Project update
    Published a paper on low-resource translation using LLMs (large language models)
    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
    Talk DFAT to me
    An AI trained to write in the style of Australian Aid reports.
  • 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.