The Icelandic startup SageWrite has received a grant of 75,000 EUR from the Women TechEU, a new European Union research grant designed to support technology companies run by women. Elena Callegari, post-doc at the Language and Technology Lab at the University of Iceland is the director of the startup she founded with Desara Xhura last year with a grant from the Rannís Tækniþróunarsjóður. This is the first time Women TechEU awards a grant to an Icelandic company.
SageWrite is developing the first text-generation and text-enhancement platform for academic writing and Elena says that the grant will be used to develop discipline-specific language models that are optimised to generate texts within the context of a specific discipline. "This will give users the possibility of selecting the language model that makes the most sense for what they are writing, i.e. if I am writing about linguistics I am going to use a model that was trained specifically to generate text on linguistics, if I am writing about particle physics I‘ll use a physics-trained language model, etc." These discipline-specific models generate text that is of much higher quality than existing models.
In the University's news article last year it is stated that the target group is large, or anyone who has to write a scientific article in English.
Please consult the Women TechEU webiste for further information.