CRITICS - Critical Science Without Borders: Language Models to Promote Critical Thinking in Science Education

Details

CRITICS is a multi-institution research project involving 13 authors across European institutions that combines scientific machine translation with educational technology. The core gap it targets: cutting-edge scientific materials are predominantly published in English, and existing general-purpose MT systems often fail to preserve technical accuracy when translating complex scientific content into students native languages. The project proposes MT systems specifically optimized for scientific terminology and conceptual accuracy, enabling educational institutions to provide culturally relevant translations while maintaining technical precision. Beyond translation, CRITICS explores curriculum-aligned science teaching proposals grounded in scientific argumentation and critical thinking frameworks, with assessment criteria inspired by competence-based evaluation. Presented as a 9-page paper at SEPLN 2026 (Spanish Natural Language Processing conference), this is a project description paper rather than a results paper. No translation quality metrics, benchmark comparisons, or student outcome data are reported in the abstract. The research direction is socially valuable—the UNESCO goal of scientific knowledge accessibility is directly relevant—but the technical contribution has not yet been demonstrated empirically.