Slashdot Mirror
Can Your Mouth Become Multilingual?
Roland Piquepaille writes "During a videoconference last week between Karlsruhe, Germany, and Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), Pittsburgh, USA, the talk of Alex Waibel, from CMU, was automatically translated in German and Spanish. Both the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (PPG) and the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review (PTR) attended the conference, took pictures and were impressed by this new 'open domain' speech-to-speech translation. This new computer technology is based on artificial intelligence (AI) and statistical methods. During the demonstration, the speaker had electrodes attached to his face and his neck, but the researchers think that these electrodes could be implanted into your mouth and your throat in a decade from now -- if you agree of course."
This still doesn't solve the problem that automatic translators still have problems processing the logic of certain languages. Just look at babelfish.
Oh yeah. Please. Right now. Insert the electrodes into me right now. I can't wait!
Is it fascism yet?
Don't believe a word of this. Everybody likes to say they've finally cracked the problem of machine translation. This is exactly what we saw previously on Slashdot with the quote about the "bin Laden tapes" or whatever.
Proof? Ah, we'll get to that later.
Where in any of the links does it give the text of what he said, and the translation? And the analysis to the success of the translation? I found two sentences it mentioned. That's not good enough. Let's allow independent examination of the success of this translation.
Rank my idea: http://www.sinceslicedbread.com/node/531
constant maintence would be needed to maintain a good database for this translator, or else the 70s slangs would be coming out of the other guys mouth. it would be much easier to LEARN a language at a young age, then you dont have to worry about "are they understanding what im saying right now?" when you use one of those high-tech translators :D
In terms of the hardware... " NASA scientists have begun to computerize human, silent reading using nerve signals in the throat that control speech." Subvocal speech reading systems offer the added bonus of now having to listen to the mundane trivia being broadcast from the cubicle next to yours.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
Neither of the links are to his blog, so at least he's not using /. as his personal piggy-bank.
So I won't even have to use a phone to get my speech intercepted, The Bad Guys [tm] now can directly wiretap my mouth. Perhaps this can be intercepted by chewing on my tinfoil hat?
Life is just nature's way of keeping meat fresh.
Computers have a hard time translating written things as it is... any bilingual will tell you that online translators for complete sentences will do nobody any good, for the most part. My Spanish teachers are all able to see papers with computer translations very easily, due to similarities in words and meanings (such as the word "pants" which can be colthing or breathing heavily) Not to mention, grammar and things like that are not done well at all. For the fun of it, try going to an Online translator and write something in English, translate it to Spanish, then back to English. Some results are pretty crazy. I guess the point I'm trying to make is this: what makes the translators so special compared to the ones we have now? How can they work better? Sure, there is probably a bit more effort put into these, but I don't think that a good translator will be available for another 5 years, not to mention the whole "take the speech you aren't saying" thing is hard to believe.
When I smash my thumb accidentally with a hammer, for a few seconds I can swear I am multilingual.
Table-ized A.I.
Klingon for the masses!
Table-ized A.I.
Another approach is from some work I saw demoed at an MIT conference in Vienna. If you capture enough video of a person speaking, you can remix/rerender video of that person saying anything you want them to say. The software works at the phonetic level so you can even synthesize words that the person has never even uttered before and even make them appear to speak languages that they don't know. They had some visually convincing video showing people saying things that the researchers claimed they never said. Yes, the demo version worked with clean test video and a professional video/image analyst could probably spot a faked/remized video. But if these technology becomes good enough, I can see it making video a nontrustworthy source of data (like skillfully retouched photos).
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Indeed, we may see a new form of slander arise.
Imagine what would happen if a malicious individual was able to modify such a system before a CEO gives a big speech to investors. The CEO is speaking English, but the Romanian and Chinese investors are listening in their native tongues.
Soon enough the CEO is talking about synergistically-tiered multi-integrated doodads, but the Romanians are hearing "Cock sucking whore bitch! I fucked her up the ass in Bucharest and her nipples bled!", while the Chinese investors are hearing a whole string of racial epithets. Who would be responsible if such an incident occurred?
Multiple nations also have hate crime legislation. Would the CEO now be responsible for committing a hate crime, merely because this device mistranslated what he said, and output racist remarks?
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
I hope they don't use it for diplomatic purposes, though:
U.S. Official discussing a movie: "In that case, I'd have to say that it bombed royally."
Foreign dignitary upon hearing translation: "Look out! He's got a bomb in his case and he's trying to kill the King!"
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I am currently taking a great course on the Introduction of Linguistists. I have been exposed to the rather complex process a human being uses to make a sound (phoneme). You can go here to get a good idea of what it truly entails http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Linguistics-and-Philosop hy/24-900Spring-2005/CourseHome/index.htm
The main obstacles to this is the fact each langauge uses different places and manners of articulation as well as the fact that intonation can change the meaning of a word. In Mandarin the word ma can change meaning based on tone.
This is not a factor in English but certainly is for most Asian languages.
The ability to use phonemes is one thing but paralinguistics is another (sarcasm).
If you're interested in reading the actual research paper involved (as opposed to a journalist's interpretation), it's readable here - pdf file, but lots of graphs, tables and pictures, so I'll forgive them.
Or perhaps the modern day battleground of evolution against the challenging new scientific theory of intelligent design, which suggests that certain biological features such as the flagellum are irreducibly complex and therefore could not possibly have been developed by increments as evolutionists would have it.
There is no modern day battleground of evolution against anything.
There is no theory of intelligent design. I suppose you could argue that there is a hypothesis of intelligent design.
The fundamental problem here is that "evolutionists" do NOT claim that evolution is a series of incremental changes. "Evolutionists" claim that evolution is a combination of a series of incremental changes alongside a series of radical mutations. These radical mutations generally result in the premature death of the creature, but can also give rise to the "irreducibly complex" of which you speak. Take for example the idea of bacteria which are resistant to certain anti-bacterial compound. The "incremental" development of resistance is ridiculous. Being slightly less dead from exposure to anti-bacterial compounds is not an inheritable trait so you cannot pass it on to your offspring. You can, however, encounter a mutation that gives resistance and then pass that mutation to offspring. Try reading up on evolution and natural selection a bit.
It's a bit like hazing, and while people on both sides of the issue become almost fanatical in defense of their sacred cow the end result is good science.
Sacred cows are Hindu. You are probably a christian. You might want to pick a different metaphor. There are no "sides" or "issues." There is fact and belief. If your beliefs are contrary to fact, then you are not on some "side," you are delusional.
But the overhead of trying to generate acceptance of a scientific breakthrough is almost as difficult as making the breakthrough to start with!
There is no need to generate acceptance of a scientific breakthrough. Science is science. The results of an experiment are fact. Whether people accept the results or not is immaterial. If you cool water to a temperature below 32 degrees fahrenheit at one atmosphere, the water will become a solid. If you choose not to "accept" that fact, you are free to, but that does not change the fact that the water is now a solid.
man, I feel like mold.
Roland: the anagram lover's Ronald.
it's about speech recognition. They've identified a new source of data for identifying phonemes, one that apparently provides cleaner output than working from the audio. Dollars to donuts the resulting words are then just popped into a Babelfish-equivalent.
This is interesting and important work, but the translation angle is really just one potential application of the technology.
As soon as my girlfriend slips her tongue in my mouth, it becomes multi-tongued and French.
And then I wake up.
Hey,
...). Such a combination would be suitable both to deal with large amounts of data (statistical) and to deal with negation (only available in the symbolic appoach).
Alex Waibel was one of the leading scientists in the Verbmobil project in 1995. The technology was pretty interesting (maintaining probability "graphs" from the Markov speech analysis through the syntactic and semantic analysis).
However, results were pretty poor due to the structure of the project (just too many people) and because many institutions really weren't interested in the project and went for their favourite research topic with a new name (that's how research in Germany works...). Perfectly possible that Mr. Waibel advanced with the topic, now 10 years after the first major trial...
Personally, I actually gave up AI completely after the ESSLLI (European Summer School on Logic, Language and Information) and promised not to touch the subject again until there were a "unified" formalism incorporating the old "symbolic" approach (predicate logic etc.) and the new statistical methods (Bayes, Markov,
Maybe they've got it this time? It's a pitty they don't talk more about the underlying formalism.
Btw., the electrodes are probably just an enhancement of the normal speech recognition software to get a better "signal".
Bests,
Frank
http://www.project-open.com/
"During the demonstration, the speaker had electrodes attached to his face and his neck, but the researchers think that these electrodes could be implanted into your mouth and your throat in a decade from now -- if you agree of course."
*shakes head*
NO NO NO, they've got it all wrong.. you implant a fish in your ear. That's how you speak multilingual, it's true.. i've read it in a book and even seen it in a movie (it must be true)
Imagine someone hacking your personal translator while you are on a trip abroad:
Hotel clerk: Rooms are 150 Euros a night.
[Translated:] Rooms are 150 Euros a night.
You: I won't pay over $130
[Hack-Translated:] Deal
Hotel clerk: Sign here
I can think of many other scenarios, some funny, some sophomoric, and some downright evil.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Why would you want to speak something other than American? Are you a terrorist?
We have secretly replaced these Slashdot mods' sense of humor with a rusty nail. Let's see if they notice!!
We had this nifty thing at school years ago, enabled us to speak 4 different languages, it was called STUDY, in addition the more we understood all these foreign languages the better we came to understand our own.
You never catch me alive