Technology · Global, United States

The challenge

The client's models handled Polish measurably worse than Western languages, and the evaluation set pointed exactly at where: inflection. Ukrainian was a related problem, and the client wanted both from one supplier under one governance framework.

What we did

We recruited a distributed team with a high language threshold, mainly graduates of philology, linguistics, translation studies and law, because morphological judgement cannot be taught in a week. A four-phase programme with an explicit error taxonomy, and quality as a gate, not a report.

Results

• Several hundred hours of transcribed and annotated Polish and Ukrainian speech, all accepted
• Inter-annotator agreement above threshold across two scale increases
• Measurable improvement in Polish on the client's internal evaluation set
• The programme extended twice and expanded to include Czech

Why it worked

The client was buying volume; what it needed was linguistic diagnosis.