Lost (and Found) in Translation

Six years ago, Muhammad Fusenig was watching his Golden State Warriors on television when the announcer mentioned Steph Curry, and Fusenig thought, “Who’s he?” Minutes later, he lost the ability to form words and ideas in his head. When he spoke, sounds came out as gibberish.

His mother rushed him to the hospital, where a doctor said he’d experienced aphasia, triggered by a migraine. Since then, Fusenig has endured a handful of similar episodes that can last as long as two hours. When they occur, he says, he’s been told the cacophonous jumble of sounds he produces is like a “bunch of musical notes, but there’s no music.”

Now the UMD doctoral student in educational psychology is channeling his occasional war with words to address what he calls language inequality in scholastic settings.

With the help of artificial intelligence (AI), Fusenig, his adviser and a collaborator at Google created a website that rewrites academic text to account for things like a student’s
reading ability, culture and even worldview. Rather than replace the original textbook language, the tailored version complements it.

High school and college students with different backgrounds read and interpret course material differently, putting some at disadvantage, he argues. A student with Caribbean parents, for example, responds to certain analogies differently than a student whose parents hail from California. Shouldn’t academic text reflect that?

The website, called advisor.ie, is being piloted in five college classrooms across the country. Some of its AI algorithms were purpose-built by Fusenig’s team to break language down based on things like syntax and complexity. ChatGPT, meanwhile, allows the team to incorporate key educational psychology principles.

Even during his less severe, more routine migraines, Fusenig finds himself slurring words, mixing up meanings and excusing himself from conversations. The communications barrier can be dismaying, but his website is part of his broader push to foster human connection by acknowledging linguistic diversity. “In my mind, everything’s a translation issue,” he says.