Globalese 4.3 released

What’s new

We wanted to make the lifecycle of an engine easier to keep track of and more transparent to our users. A new Versions tab that does just that has been added to every engine. This is similar to the existing Versions tab for corpora: it shows the properties of the engine over time — or rather, over various trained versions (since a new engine version is created every time a training finishes.). You can see the composition of corpora, the version of stock corpora or engines used, as well as which Globalese version the various engine versions were trained on. (Note that historical data may not be always accurate, but it is going to be going forward.)

Above all versions, you will also find a version named Next. (In fact, this is the only “version” displayed for new engines that have not been trained yet.) This is a special one that always shows the current state of the engine, i.e. after the last edit. This is how the engine’s next version will look like when you hit the Train button after making changes to the engine.

You will also notice a badge labelled Active. Currently this always indicates the last trained engine version, which is the one used for translation. There has been some ambiguity over what was previously displayed in the Master corpora and Auxiliary corpora tables, because once you edited an engine, it was no longer obvious what corpora were used in the active version. From version 4.3 on, we no longer have to make compromises about that.

Making clearer which version of an engine was trained how and when also enables us to introduce more new functionality related to engine versions in upcoming releases.

Where have the Train/Edit/Clone buttons gone?

We thought it makes sense to move the Train/Cancel training, Edit and Clone buttons from the header of the engine page to the Versions tab. Since it is always the next version that gets trained, edited or cloned, we believe it is the best user experience if you find these buttons together with the pertaining information.

Important changes

• If you have been using the Quick training functionality, you probably know that in order to be able to quick train a (previously trained) engine, you had to update some of the master corpora in the engine. From version 4.3, removing one master corpus and adding another will not qualify the engine for quick training. Instead, you should be updating corpora using the existing corpus update functionality, so Globalese understands that the engine is using the same corpus, only a more recent version of it. (Note that you can still add new master corpora to engines and quick train them, as before.)
• The API endpoint /v3/engines/{engineId}/resources has changed. Please check out the updated specification.

Minor changes and improvements

• As more and more v3 API endpoints become publicly available, we continue to deprecate v2.1 API endpoints. They will still be around for a while, but it’s best to familiarise yourself with version 3 of the API, if you haven’t already done so.
• Improved the speed of displaying tabular data on statistics pages.

Fixes

• A 400 status code is returned alongside a meaningful message in case of an error uploading corpora using the v2.1 API. (Previously, a 500 status code was returned.)