By Nina McCambridge
While Etan Cohn was applying for jobs after he graduated from Carnegie Mellon in May, he decided that he should come up with a project in order to gain experience. “I took a psychology class at Carnegie Mellon [Intro to Psychology, taught by Dr. Kody Manke] that I really liked — there were a couple that I took — but in one of the ones I really liked, we were talking about different memory techniques,” he said. He recalled how struck he was by the “memory palace” technique. He said, “I found that stuff really, really interesting. There’s a related strategy called linkword mnemonics. And I realized when we learned this… I’ve been learning languages wrong this entire time.” At the time, he was learning Spanish, and he began testing the linkword techniques on his own language learning. (This is a technique for memorizing a pair of words using a sentence that involves both words.) It worked shockingly well. He considered why more people don’t use this technique, and decided that it was likely because of the difficulty of generating a creative sentence. However, with ChatGPT, this issue seemed tractable.
Next, he enlisted his lifelong friend Seth Dolginoff, who’d recently graduated from the University of Texas at Dallas. They named their app Lingua Link and their company 9701 Studios LLC. While Cohn does the programming and the user interface for Lingua Link, Dolginoff does the business and marketing. Dolginoff has also had good experiences with mnemonic devices; he told the story of how in high school, he was able to memorize at least 200 words in a couple of weeks for a medical terminology class. At first, the task seemed impossible, but through mnemonic audio tapes the teacher had provided, he and most other students were able to memorize the words. “And we’re able to do those things using AI,” he said. “It’s just insane, the things that we’re now able to do with technology.”
Lingua Link has language options in Mandarin Chinese, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, and Spanish. It’s not intended to be an individual’s primary method of language acquisition. Users can input words that they have learned through other channels (for instance, Duolingo or a book) and the app will use API calls to GPT-3 to come up with a sentence that can be used to memorize the translation of the word. Users can also generate random words to memorize, but this is not always very helpful. Users can even generate AI images representing the AI sentence. There’s also a game feature that quizzes you on the vocabulary you’ve selected.
The vocabulary that users input is stored so that if another user chooses the same word, it will load more quickly. There are some safeguards, but the word list is determined in a very decentralized way. The app also verifies that words are real, protecting against GPT’s tendency to hallucinate. Cohn says that “we can’t guarantee that it’s every single time 100 percent accurate because that’s just a limitation. But if you search for a word that doesn’t exist, it will check for similar words and give you those as suggestions.”
Because of the AI-based nature of the app, Cohn and Dolginoff don’t have to actually know the languages their app offers. However, it’s still difficult to add languages beyond the six already offered. Cohn says, “as we’re still growing the app, it’s just a little easier to maintain, or to make changes since we have to make them across different languages.” There’s also the fact that GPT is much better trained in some languages than in others. When they tried adding a Japanese option, “It just wasn’t always giving the best results. Like, it was just usable.” This is because GPT hasn’t been trained on as much Japanese text. However, as the app grows, “there’s also some fine-tuning and other methods that exist, so we do feel like we can definitely add Japanese back in, and add a bunch of other languages as well.”
Cohn and Dolginoff are excited to see Lingua Link growing. Their app is free, and by selling advertising space, they make a modest profit. (They also have full-time jobs. “We’re just doing more work as our hobby basically,” they told The Tartan. “You’re a CMU student, you get it, right?”) Dolginoff says, “We have plans for big changes over time to the app. And we have plans for the Lingua Link brand also, besides just the app.” This includes the addition of a feed into the app, which will use “machine learning and spaced repetition.” They’re also planning on adding audio pronunciation of words, as well as many other possible features.
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