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Translation Software That Learns by Reading

Posted by samzenpus on from the it-is-fundamental dept.

redcone writes "New Scientist is reporting that translation software that develops an understanding of languages by scanning through thousands of previously translated documents has been released by U.S. researchers. According to the article "The translated documents used to teach the translation algorithms can be electronic, on paper, or even audio files. The system is not only faster than other methods, but also better suited to tackling less common languages and the unusual vocabulary found in specialised or technical texts.""

3 of 308 comments (clear)

  1. Philosophical caveat by Raindance · · Score: 4, Insightful

    As a caveat, we should be wary of saying the system "understands" a language.

    I would say generally that humans able to translate between languages generally understand both languages, but whether a statistical, probabilistic model based on correlations understands a language might be a stretch.

    Further reading: Searle's Chinese Room argument- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room

    This is akin to asking, Does your tax software understand the tax code? Does Photoshop understand the principles of image manipulation?

    Are these silly questions to ask?

    Further reading: Dennett on intentionality (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennett but the entry is pretty sparse).

    RD

    1. Re:Philosophical caveat by back_pages · · Score: 4, Insightful
      Great example of this:

      Mom baked for three hours.
      The pie baked for three hours.

      "Mom" and "The pie" are the subjects. The verb and entire predicate are identical. Understanding the language disambiguates these sentences, but the ambiguity is part of what defines humor.

      A man walked into a bar. Ouch!

      A man wanted to win a pun contest in the local newspaper, so he entered 10 times in order to increase the chances that one of his entries would win. Unfortunately, no pun in ten did.

      You can translate that 50 ways from Sunday but without understanding the language - understanding what makes those statements interesting - the machine will lose all their meaning.

  2. Translating specialised texts ... by rkmath · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The article (and the text of the orginial posting) makes it seem like translating a specialized technical text is somehow harder than translating, say, a newspaper article. As someone experienced in translating technical (science/engineering) documents, I can say that any tech document is far _easier_ to translate after an initial learning curve.

    The main reason (I think) is that: tech documents have specialised vocabulary and idioms, but these are much fewer than the idioms one has to master in order to understand the editorial page in a newspaper.

    With a rudimentary knowledge of Russian and French, I have found it much easier to read an engineering textbook or paper in these languages, than reading any nontechnical text. (This is not necessarily the case with other languages. Any document in Japanese for instance is an entirely different ballgame ...)