New Algorithm for Learning Languages

An anonymous reader writes "U.S. and Israeli researchers have developed a method for enabling a computer program to scan text in any of a number of languages, including English and Chinese, and autonomously and without previous information infer the underlying rules of grammar. The rules can then be used to generate new and meaningful sentences. The method also works for such data as sheet music or protein sequences."

Comments

Sucks to be a support tech in India

[HeLLFiRe1151]

Their jobs be outsourced to computers.

Didn't Google already do this?

[powerline22]

Google apparently has a system like this in their labs, and entered it into some national competetion, where it pwned everyone else. Apparently, the system learned how to translate to/from chinese extremely well, without any of the people working on the project knowing the language.

Re:Didn't Google already do this?

[spisska]

IIRC, Google's translator works from a source of documents from the UN. By cross referencing the same set of documetents in all kinds of different languages, it is able to do a pretty solid translation built on the work of goodness knows how many professional translators.

What is a little more confusing to me is how machine translation can deal with finer points in language, like different words in a target language where the source language has only one. English for example has the word "to know" but many languages use different words depending on whether it is a thing or a person that is known. Or words that relate to the same physical object but carry very different cultural connotations -- the word for female dog is not derogatory in every language, for example, but some other animals can be extremely profane depending on who you talk to.

Or situations where two entirely different real-world concepts mean similar things in their respective language -- in English, for example, you're up shit creek, but in Slavic languages you're in the pussy.

I've done translation work before (Slovak -> English), and there's much more going on than differences in words and grammar. There are whole conceptual frameworks in languages that just don't translate, and this is frustrating for anyone learning a language, let alone trying to translate. English is very precise (when used as directed) in matters of time and sequence -- we have more than 20 verb tenses where most languages get away with three.

Consider this:

I was having breakfast when my sister, whom I hadn't seen in five years, called and asked if I was going to the county fair this weekend. I told her I wasn't because I'm having the painters come on Saturday. They'll have finished by 5:00, I told her, so we can get together afterwords.

These three sentences use six different tenses: past continuous, past perfect, past simple, present continuous, future perfect, and present simple, and are further complicated by the fact that you have past tenses refering to the future, present tenses refering to the future, and the wonderful future perfect tense that refers to something that will be in the past from an arbitrary future perspective, but which hasn't actually happened yet. Still following?

On the other hand, English is much less precise in things like prepositions and objects, and utterly inexplicable when it comes to things like articles, phrasal verbs, and required word order -- try explaining why:

I'll pick you up after work

I'll pick the kids up after work

I'll pick up the kids after work

are all OK, but

I'll pick up you after work

is not.

Machine translation will be a wonderful thing for a lot of reasons, but because of these kinds of differences in languages, it will be limited to certain types of writing. You may be able to get a computer to translate the words of Shakespeare, but a rose, by whatever name, is not equally sweet in every language.

SCIgen

[OverlordQ]

SCIgen anyone?

PDF of paper

[mattjb0010]

Paper here for those who have PNAS access.

Re:PDF of paper

[ksw2]

Paper here for those who have PNAS access.

HEH! funniest meant-to-be-serious acronym ever.

Markov Chains anyone?

[ImaLamer]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markov_chain

Used this (easy to compile) C program:

http://www.eblong.com/zarf/markov/

to create these:

http://www.mintruth.com/mirror/texts/

Mod points to whomever can tell us what texts they use. (No mod points can actually be given)

No the didn't

[Ogemaniac]

I played around with the Google translator for a while. I work in Japan and am half-way fluent. Google couldn't even turn my most basic Japanese emails into comprehensible English. Same is true for the other translation programs I have seen.

I will believe this new program when I see it.

Translation, especially from extremely different languages, is absurdly difficult. For example, I was out with a Japanese woman the other night, and she said "aitakatta". Literally translated, this means "wanted to meet". Translated into native English, it means "I really wanted to see you tonight". It is going to take one hell of a computer program to figure that out from statistical BS. I barely could with my enormous meat-computer and a whole lot of knowledge of the language.

Re:Noam Chomsky

[venicebeach]

Perhaps a linguist could weigh in on this, but it seems to me that this kind of research is quite contrary to the Chomskian view of linguistics.

Instead of a language module with specialized abilities tuned to learn rule-based grammar, we have an an unsupervised learning system has surmised the grammar of the language merely from the patterns inherent in the data it is given. That a system can do this is evidence against the notion that an innate grammar module in the brain is necessary for language.

Re:just thought..

[Mac Degger]

What they've develloped is something which interprets grammar; the ruleset behind the organisation of buildingblocks, apparently buildingblock agnostic.

A dictionary is just words. This algorythm cant assign meaning to the buildingblocks, it can only dicide how and in what order the buildingblocks go together.

English only has two tenses.

[ericbg05]

I've done translation work before (Slovak -> English), and there's much more going on than differences in words and grammar. There are whole conceptual frameworks in languages that just don't translate, and this is frustrating for anyone learning a language, let alone trying to translate.

Yes! I'd have thrown a mod point at you just for this paragraph if I could.

English is very precise (when used as directed) in matters of time and sequence -- we have more than 20 verb tenses where most languages get away with three.

Not really. Firstly, English only has two or three tenses. (Depending upon which linguist you ask, English either has a past/non-past distinction or past/present/future distinctions. See [1], [2]. The general consensus seems to be in favor of the former, although I humbly disagree with the general consensus.) It maintains a variety of aspect distinctions (perfective vs imperfective, habitual vs continuous, nonprogressive vs progressive). See [3]. Its verbs also interact with modality, albeit slightly less strongly.

It's a very common mistake to count the combinations of tense, aspect, and modality in a language and arrive at some astronomical number of "tenses". It's an even more common mistake (for native English speakers, anyway) to think that English is special or different or strange compared to other languages. In most cases, it's not -- especially when compared with other Indo-European languages.

Secondly, and more interestingly IMHO, most languages do not have three distinct tenses. The most common cases are either to have a future/non-future distinction or a past/non-past distinction. In any case, the future tense, if it exists, is normally derived from modal or aspectual markers and is diachronically weak (which is linguist-babble meaning "future tenses forms don't stick around for very long"). See [3].

English is a perfect example: will, of course, used to refer to the agent's desire (his or her will) to do something. Only recently has it shifted to have a more temporal sense, and it still maintains some of its modal flavor. In fact, the least marked way of making the future (in the US, at least) is to use either gonna or a present progressive form: I'm having dinner with my boss tonight. I'm gonna ask him for a raise. See Comrie [1] again.

So as not to be anglo-centric, I'll give another example. Spanish has three widespread means of forming the future tense. Two of these are periphrastic and are exemplified by he de cantar 'I've gotta sing' and voy a cantar 'I'm gonna sing'. The last is the synthetic form, cantaré 'I'll sing'.

Most high school or college Spanish teachers would tell you that the "pure" future is cantaré. Actually, it's historically derived from the phrase cantar he 'I have to sing' (from Latin cantáre habeo), and is being displaced by the other two forms all across the Spanish-speaking world. I'm told, for example, that cantaré has been largely lost in in Argentina and southern Chile (see [4]).

In any case, the parent's main point still holds. It's a b?tch to deal with cross-linguistic differences in major semantic systems computationally. But good lord, it's fun to try. :)

References:

1. Comrie, Bernard. Tense. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
2. Davidsen-Nielsen, Niels. "Has English a Future?" Acta Linguistica Hafniensia 21 (1987): 5-20.
3. Frawley, William.

Random test ...

[Mostly a lurker]

I know it is fairly accurate because I have fooled my spanish speaking friends once in an IM conversation. I told them I learned spanish via hypnosis and basically just copy/pasted everything spanish into IM. The conversation went on for like 15 minutes full spanish before I told them I was using the website. They were pissing their pants.

English to German produces:

Ich weiß, dass es ziemlich genau ist, weil ich mein Spanisch getäuscht habe, Freunde einmal in einer IM Konversation zu sprechen. Ich habe sie erzählt, dass ich Spanisch über Hypnose und im Grunde nur Kopie gelernt habe/hat eingefügt alles Spanisch in IM. Die Konversation ist weitergegangen für wie 15 Minuten volles Spanisch, bevor ich sie erzählt habe, dass ich die Website benutzte. Sie pissten ihre Hose

Then, German to English:

I know that it rather exactly is, because I deceived my Spanish to speak friends once in one IN THE conversation. I told it, learned would have inserted that I Spanish over hypnosis and in the reason only copy all Spanish in IN THAT. The conversation is gone on for Spanish full like 15 minutes before I told it, that I the websites used. You pissten its pair of pants

My conclusion is that there is still a place for human translators.