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Romancing The Rosetta Stone
Roland Piquepaille writes "Not only this news release from the University of Southern California has a fantastic title, it also has a great content. This story is about one of their scientists, Franz Josef Och, whose software ranks very high among translation systems. "Give me enough parallel data, and you can have a translation system for any two languages in a matter of hours," said Dr. Och, paraphrasing Archimedes. His approach relies on two concepts, gathering huge amounts of data, and applying statistical models to this data. It completely ignores grammar rules and dictionaries. "Och's method uses matched bilingual texts, the computer-encoded equivalents of the famous Rosetta Stone inscriptions. Or, rather, gigabytes and gigabytes of Rosetta Stones." Read my summary for more details."
That's an example from a few years' back of an attempt to translate "the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak" from English to Russian and back to English using a different translator.
Can anyone try this on the new (or some other recent) algorithm?
BTW here's Doc Och's most recent website:
Franz Josef Och
Esteem isn't a zero sum game
As press releases tend to do, this leaves much to be desired for folks who are familiar with the discipline. As I read it, it seems to imply that the main driver is phrase-matching. What does it do with phrases it hasn't seen before? The problem is solved by throwing lots of data at it -- how much data is needed for a reasonable system? How well does it generalize to text outside the domains of the training data?
Incidentally, had my brother been a girl, he was in serious danger of being named Rosetta Stone.
-- Trevor Stone, aka Flwyd
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
I wonder how this would fare putting two computer languages side by side? I mean... take a few thousand programs, coded using the same algorithms but different computer languages... would his language translation software translate between them? Would it be able to differentiate between languages that manually allocate memory and those that use garbage collection? How about between procedural langauages like C, and more esoteric and oddly structured languages like LISP?
An interesting challenge, eh?
Would there be any benefit to this?
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
Time for inflamatory reasoning. The statistical approach will beat out the grammar and rule based ones, at least for English, is for the simple reason:
English is not a language
Or rather, it resembles one but is more not than is, IMO. It is a large collection of idiomatic expressions that changes quite rapidly (and not only in colloquial forms, just look at what the political-correctness movement has done to phraseology). You know the story... more exceptions than rules, things that are legitimate to say language-wise are considered incorrect anyways, and vice versa, etc. etc.
That's not to say it doesn't have advantages; it's relatively easy to learn the basics of communication since it's weakly conjugated, has genderless articles, fairly simple uncased sentence structure. But, it is monstrous to master and I suspect most native speakers aren't true masters (not to mention the orthographical nightmare; is English the only language with spelling bee contests?)
The reason it's the new lingua franca (or should it be lingua angla now?) is techno-socio-political as is always the case. Stop harping on Americans for being largely mono-lingual. "Why didn't the Romans learn the local languages when they controlled Europe? Because they didn't have to." If every state spoke a different language, which would be more akin to Europe, then there would be need.