SKT Collaborates with National Institute of Korean Language to Develop 'AI Hangukeo' Model

[Asia Economy Reporter Seolgina Jo] SK Telecom has decided to develop a next-generation artificial intelligence (AI) language model optimized for Korean by utilizing language information from the National Institute of the Korean Language.

On the 7th, SK Telecom signed a business agreement with the National Institute of the Korean Language on this matter.

The next-generation AI Korean model is a Korean general language model (GLM) that demonstrates performance similar to GPT-3, which is evaluated at a human ability level. Functions such as solving language-related problems, writing, translation, and performing simple coding based on given sentences will also be implemented in Korean.

It can be applied to various language activities ranging from everyday emotional conversations and customer center dialogues in various industries to current affairs, literature, history, and games, and it is expected to be additionally utilized in new industrial fields based on this.

The GLM developed by SK Telecom is planned to be a massive language model with 150 billion parameters. The latest language model, GPT-3, has 175 billion parameters, making it more than 100 times larger than the previous version, GPT-2.

SK Telecom plans to develop the GLM by the end of this year, verify the model’s performance through internal services, and then proceed with commercialization. It will later be applied to various services. They also plan to develop methods for evaluating Korean language model performance and conduct research on Korean data quality assessment. SK Telecom has been developing AI language models since 2018.

Along with this, the National Institute of the Korean Language decided to reorganize the ‘2021 Korean Language Information Processing System Competition’ to compete AI’s language communication ability using SK Telecom’s AI language model and hold it during Hangul Week.

Davis Eric Hartman, Head of SK Telecom Language Superintelligence Labs, said, “We are contributing to the informatization of Korean by proactively developing AI language models optimized for Korean,” and added, “We plan to contribute to the scientification and globalization of Korean through this cooperation with the National Institute of the Korean Language.”

Jung Heewon, Director of the Language Research Office at the National Institute of the Korean Language, said, “We will continue to discover language information resources necessary for AI development and build systems so that they can be usefully utilized in related industries and academia.”

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.