Laszlo Tihanyi

A computational linguist who has dedicated his entire professional career to developing translation programs. He has participated in all four generations of these as a researcher, developer, and project manager.
His professional career began at the Computer Science Coordination Institute ( SzKI ) in 1987, where he developed the first English-Hungarian dictionary program (AMI).

He started as a founder and co-owner of MorhoLogic Kft.; he was the developer of the first Hungarian morphological analyzer and spell checker, Helyes-e? (Microsoft Word), and the MobiMouse dictionary programs (these language technology tools and resources became the building blocks of later translation programs). In parallel, he worked on corpus linguistics in connection with the large dictionary work at the Institute of Linguistics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Then, at MorphoLogic, he was the initiator, developer, and then project manager of the first Hungarian rule-based translation program (English-Hungarian, and Hungarian-English) called MetaMorpho/MorphoWord. (The free Google Translate, which was released in the meantime, marked the end of the development of this paid translation program.)

Since 2010, he has been the founder of iTranslate Ltd., and until 2012, he was the originator and technical coordinator of the EU translation software project of the same name.

Since 2012, he has been a developer of the European Commission (EC) translation software in Luxembourg. He first developed the statistical (Moses-based) translation software MT@EC. Since 2015, the machine translation at the EC has been based on neural (also known as machine learning) technology, on his initiative (this is the translation service available today under the name eTranslation). Since 2023, also on his initiative and based on his experiments, the machine translation system has been supported by artificial intelligence (AI) (the fourth-generation translator supported by large language models (LLM) represented a further improvement in quality).

The John Neumann Computer Science Society (NJSZT) awarded him the Kalmár Prize in 2011.