João Graça

Business Data

Personal Bio

João Graça is a co-founder, Chief Technology Officer, and computational genius behind Unbabel. Portuguese born, João studied computer science at doctorate level at one of Lisbon’s most well-respected technical universities, Instituto Superior Técnico de Lisboa. During his studies, he published a number of well-received papers on machine learning, computational research, and computational linguistics — all of which form the bedrock of Unbabel’s machine translation engine. After graduation, João worked with INESC-ID, developing research in natural language processing (NLP) and went on to do his postdoc in NLP at the University of Pennsylvania. João was awarded a Marie Curie, Welcome II Scholarship (2011), which he declined in favor of entrepreneurship. He worked with now Unbabel CEO, Vasco Pedro, together on the development of language learning algorithms and machine learning tools, plus held various research scientist roles before co-founding Unbabel in 2013.

Presentation title:

Tower LLM: An Intentional Multilingual Large Language Model for Translation-related Tasks

Presentation description:

In this presentation we will present TowerLLM an LLM that is state of the art for several translation related tasks even when competing with much bigger models. We present a recipe for training such a model and how it involved over time. We describe the importance of accounting and planning for different languages from scratch, how the quality of data and data curation plays a central role during training, and how training for different tasks makes the model better at each task. We present some real use cases results of tower in production scenarios.