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More on Statistical Language Translation
DrLudicrous writes "The NYTimes is running an article about how statistical language translation schemes have come of age. Rather than compile an extensive list of words and their literal translations via bilingual human programmers, statistical translation work by comparing texts in both English and another language and 'learning' the other language via statistical methods applied to units called 'N-grams'- e.g. if 'hombre alto' means tall man, and 'hombre grande' means big man, then hombre=man, alto=tall, and grande=big." See our previous story for more info.
France = "Cheese Eating Surrender Monkey"
George Bush = "Neo-Imperialist Moron"
Tony Blair = "Lap Dog"
WMD = "No where to be found"
and of course
Dossier = Creative Story Telling
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Translation-unit this algorithm perfectly works! Deutsch this was typed and translation-unit to English makes this was!
The cake is a pie
Reminds me of story see bottom of this page
The US Gov't was funding an early computer group to translate documents from Russian-to-English and back. The hope, obviously, was to eliminate the need for human translators. A particular sentence was fed to the computer, which translated it into Russian. The computer was then fed the Russian, and it translated it back to English.
The original sentence was "The spirit is strong, but the flesh is weak".
The resulting sentence? "The vodka is good, but the meat is rotten".
The computer didn't know which of the many possible words to use when translating spirit, so it used "vodka". Likewise, it tried to put the word "strong" into context, and since strong vodka is prized in Russia, it decided that the vodka was good. Likewise, flesh got translated to meat, and weak flesh became bad meat.
Yoda, is that you?
Black holes are where God divided by zero