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Google Admits to Using Sohu Database
prostoalex writes "A few days ago a Chinese company, Sohu.com, alleged Google improperly tapped its database for its Pinyin IME product, stirring controversy on whether two databases were similar just due to normal research process. Today Google admitted that its new product for Chinese market 'was built leveraging some non-Google database resources.' 'The dictionaries used with both software from Google and Sohu shared several common mistakes, where Chinese characters were matched with the wrong Pinyin equivalents. In addition, both dictionaries listed the names of engineers who had developed Sohu's Sogou Pinyin IME.'"
Leverage! Leverage!
Let no one else's work cut short your edge,
Against the truth you can surely hedge,
So don't cut short your edge,
But leverage, leverage, leverage!
(One man deserves the credit! One man deserves the blame!
And Sergei Brin Ivanovich Lobachevsky is his name!)
"In the future, Google invents a time machine that's used by a rogue employee to travel back in time to give Sohu this database. It's clear then that Sohu stole our database."
"Stolen from Apple Computer" (whole story)
I guess Google Labs will have to subscribe to Turnitin.com now.
Proof by very large bribes. QED.
When caught making a mistake, they admit it, work to resolve it, and move on? ...
I think there are a few other companies who could learn from that approach
surely after helping so many students copy their research papers you should know the number 1 rule of copying another persons work: Change the F*CKING NAME!
Is this a single isolated incident or simply the first one of more coming from the company that does no evil?
"Do no evil"
should be changed to
"Do just a tiny bit of evil"
which at this rate will probably end up as
"All your web are belong to us"
So then, did the guy who stole my car stereo, was he "leveraging some non-car thief assets"?
I don't respond to AC's.
Google is going to release a statement that stealing code/data is not evil in China, and Google must fit in local cultures and abide by local laws.
Seriously, this is just pathetic. I am appalled by the Google apologists on slashdot.
Chinese input is a well established market; Google Giant forces itself into the market with a product that is very similar to existing ones and offers no innovation. That is not evil enough? They did this by stealing data and who knows what from others. Mind you that the data is not publicly available, so Google must have committed certain crimes to obtain the data.
For those who don't see what's the big deal: the mapping from ASCII sequence to Chinese character/phrase is not trivial; actually it is what Chinese input is all about.
This reminds me of the recent story about GPL code found in OpenBSD. There too, an OpenBSD developer took someone else's code and started modifying it without keeping the GPL license. He apparently thought it was ok to do this as long as all the offending functions would be renamed in the final release, but was caught checking in unmodified functions by accident.
Google is well known for using a lot of GPL software, but it is also true that they do not distribute the source code of their flagship programs to the public. Episodes like this make people wonder if they "accidentally" use some GPL code in their distributed products without telling anyone.
> They have not complied with Sohu's requests to date.
:-)
One of Sohu's demands was to remove it. They did that, even prior to the cease & desist deadline, per the article. It sounds like they'll have to compensate Sohu next, which isn't overly surprising. As for where they got it, perhaps someone sold it to them? We don't know, so I'll reserve judgment about whether it was acquired in an un-Google "evil" way until we hear the rest of the story.
> It's not the first time Google have taken a fairly liberal interpretation of someone else's copyright either.
As for the copyright stance, I honestly don't care. Yes, I dislike Microsoft's hypocrisy concerning copyright, but I don't really give a damn about imaginary property at this point in time, and I don't see Google out there telling people that copyright infringement is evil, wrong, Communist and anti-American.
Frankly, I'm more inclined to distribute my works with only one request: that you do not acknowledge my authorship in any way. Of course, almost the only way to enforce that is to post AC
So now american companies are pirating chinese software? Oh the irony! :)
... Theo De Raadt says that the Chinese are INHUMAN.
*ducks*
Nobody believes the official spokesman, but everybody trusts an unidentified source. -- Ron Nesen
If you ask around in the GIS/mapping community, it's known that the [street] map data providers (Delorme, Garmin, etc) will insert garbage data here and there. A street name is slightly wrong, or they have a mystery street that doesn't exist in the real world. They use it to try and tell if/when someone steals their data. If Zyugyz Road in Somecity, CA exists- the legal team fires at will.
It's kind of weird, considering that most mapping companies do little more than get their hands on town/county/state GIS data for cheap, massage it a bit, then charge assloads of money for it.
Please help metamoderate.
Following the protocols established by the recent OpenBSD/Linux Broadcom driver fiasco, the proper response would be to denounce Sohu for having been ripped off by Google.
Shame on you Sohu! This is inhuman!
Google may be filled with the best engineers, but once you move out of North America, they know nothing about ethics or morality.
I'm curious how much time you've spent outside of North America, because I'm pretty sure 92% of the world population would disagree with you.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
After all, we know that all Google employees are under Total Management Mind Control, and that Google Knows Everything Everyone's Doing. It's not even remotely possible that a handful of Google employees in China could shadily cut corners (using an already-extant database instead of compiling one from their own company's data) without Sergey Brin and Larry Page having personally authorized it from Mountain View, or that it would actually take a bit of time for upper management to investigate an issue when it's uncovered.
Exactly. Reading 95% of the comments for this story and yesterday's story, everyone seems to think that this is about stealing code. This is about Google using the same data to train an algorithm. Both algorithms make the same mistakes because they were trained using the same data, which contained incorrectly labled information. It is whether or not this data was publicly available that is the issue.
For (a horribly contrived) example: Lets say that I write some hand writing recognition software using a neural-net. In order to train my software, I use a large database of handwriting samples that I have found on the web. However, the person that compiled this database made the mistake of labeling all of the sample images of the letter 'n' as the letter 'q', and all of the images of the letter 'q' are labeled as the letter 'n'. Person B comes along and uses the same data set to train a naïve-Bayes classifier. Guess what? Both algorithms will make the same mistakes when it comes to the letters 'n' and 'q'. Not because I stole code from Person B, but because we used the same training data.
I'm not defending Google at all here. If they stole the data from Sohu, they should get in trouble. Based on the fact that Google is in the web-mining business, I would guess that they just grabbed this data off of the net, and someone forgot to think about if they had the right to use it.
There are a lot of misundertstandings about how IME works and how Google copied non-public databases. So let me explain.
... in general, the same sequence could map to many different words (could be several dozens), and you usually need to select from them by choosing 1, 2, 3, ...(the input bar will display them from which you could choose, somtimes needing page-down). A native implementation of pinyin is thus very slow and cumbersome to use.
IME accepts keyboard input and converts it into certain language characters. There are many different input methods that decide how to generate Chinese characters by using English keyboards, and pinyin is one of them (and the most popular one).
pinyin is popular because it's simple and bears almost no learning curve. However, it suffers the problem of aliasing. For example, "shi" under pinyin will convert into "" "" ""
A good implementation uses following approaches:
1. adjust word location by how frequently it's used in the past. So most frequently used words are shift to the front, making selection much faster. Typically they should fit into the first page (no scrolling required).
2. allow partial input for common phrases. This inputs a whole phrase at once, each character only requiring the first English letters. It speeds up input significantly.
So the quality of the pinyin method depends heavily on how well the input could guess and prioritize the guesses, and thus the dictionary that is being used. And generating this dictionary (keeping it both contemporary and accurate) takes a lot of time.
The dictionary is typically distributed together with the input method (or it wouldn't work). You could obtain sohu's dictionary by just installing its input method, and Google has likely obtained it this way. However, I don't think it's in an open-standard format, so Google probably has done certain reverse-engineering to be able to actually use it in its own software.
"The internet is about the free exchange of other people's ideas!"
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
I've been thinking about this. Throwing the evilness of Google aside for a moment, why should someone be able to copyright a listing of the phonetic pronunciation of an alphabet?
Let's just imagine how I might create this list. I would have to hire people who spoke the Chinese. Then I would ask them to record the pronunciation of each character that they know. This is pretty easy because in Chinese each character has only one pronunciation (per dialect, anyway). There are about 3500 characters that you need to know in order to be literate. And all of these people would have learned these at school.
But how did they learn them? Well, they had a textbook and they memorized the list from the textbook.
Wait. I can't just memorize a list from one book and put it in another book. That's copyright infringement. In order for it not to be copyright infringement, I need to make sure that my sources all memorized the pronunciations from different sources. That's going to be difficult.
But let's say I do that. Now I have a list of the 3500 most common characters. And with that, I've probably got 99% of everything that's in a newspaper. But that's probably not good enough. I probably want a list
of say 60,000 characters. Otherwise it's pretty useless in a general sense. Uncommon characters are uncommon, but you *will* bump into the words over time.
So where do I find these characters? Can I hire some guy that knows them all? It would be very difficult. The best place to look is in a book. But wait... what am I going to do? Every time I find a character my people don't know, look it up in a book? Why don't I just copy it from the book in the first place? That's just copyright infringement again.
Really, the task of creating this list authoritatively without infringing copyright is monumental. Probably the *only* way to do it is with a community project where people just submit the pronunciations they know.
But if I'm going to have a community project like this, what the heck do I need copyright for? What am I protecting? If everyone is going to contribute, everyone should benefit.
So, personally, I don't think one should have copyright on this kind of material (same thing for spelling). It's just not in the public interest. This goes doubly so now that we have the internet and creating these kinds of projects is very inexpensive.
OK, I've gone on long enough... But one more rant. What's with this "do no evil" thing? Isn't that setting the bar a little low. If I told my parents that I'd work hard not to be evil, I think they'd be somewhat disappointed in me. If Google wanted to actually "do some good" rather than "do no evil", they could start a community project to collect this data and share it with the world.
Sigh... I guess we'll have to wait for some guy in his garage (but here's betting that someone has already started something).
TURN ABOUT IS FAIR PLAY.
Ok fine, we have stolen from them before... but Beef and Broccoli don't count.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
The advanced feature will be:
When you are typing your term paper using this IME, the IME will automatically google the Web and find out other papers on the same topic and you can just stop thinking and typing but instead copy from those paper on a click of a button.
They're significantly reducing the lockin to Microsoft products, by encouraging, buying and thereafter funding web application projects that often overlap with what is currently locked in to Microsoft. They even brew some of their own sometimes. They continue the development of Linux and Python with a wide adoption of both. All of these things are creating wealth for everyone, and crippling Microsoft little by little, which we know is what we want. I'd much rather have a Google & Microsoft duopoly if it means Microsoft would finally have to clean up its shit and accomodate whatever open source platform Google would support in that scenario.
Sam ty sig.
Sorry, I was just leveraging some non-personal resources.
According to TFA, the data (which apparently was built by the Sohu company) was not publically available and was not licensed to other companies. Obviously, the data must exist in some form within the product itself. That would suggest that either the company had some unsecured internal servers, or that Google hired some of their people who conveniently kept a copy of the data, or they figured out how to decode the data dictionary from a copy of the product.
Interestingly, TFA says that Google are now using "tens of thousands" of data points culled from their web crawls, whereas previously the Sohu dataset contained 300,000+ data points. That suggests that a straight web crawl is much less effective than doing the legwork that the Sohu company did. In fact, speculating a little more: 330,000 is the size of the dataset claimed by Sohu, and 300,000 is the overlap size claimed by the company. Assuming Google's product had both web crawl data and Sohu's data initially, that would suggest that Google's web crawl data is only about 30,000 data points, one tenth the size.
In information retrieval, database size tends to matter more than algorithms. For example, one major reason for Google's own superiority over its competitors in web search is that its own webcrawl dataset is at least twice the size of its nearest competitor. If you look at a company like Ask.com who are fourth and have some very interesting clustering algorithms based on the teoma search engine, they would definitely be competitive with Google if they only had a comparable size web crawl database.
I think you are misunderstanding how a Pinyin input works. But anyhow, it is rumored that Sohu had put in some "database finger prints" in their database. Which means, there are hard-coded patterns of Chinese characters that you wouldn't normally get by typing in corresponding English letters (i.e. Name of some Sohu employees). The mistake confirmed by Chinese users, is in fact a misspelling. A Chinese comedian's name, which should be spelled "feng gong" (two characters), can only be outputted by typing "ping gong" in both IME. I am going to try to explain why this is obviously a proof of "leveraging". Names of people and other stuff in Chinese, are mostly combinations of Chinese characters that have no logical or any connections. That means, by just using algorithms, names won't come up by just typing their corresponding pronunciation.
Chinks are chinese, gooks are vietnamese. People need to learn to keep their racial slurs straight or soon we won't be able to tell who anybody hates, and that would be terrible!
Sohu cares?
No, actually, "gook" is a term that originated in the Korean war for Korean people. Because many of the soldiers who fought in the Korean war were officers in the Vietnam war, their racial slurs were adopted and modified by a new generation, leading to great confusion about the origins of the term.
The etymology of the word gook is interesting, because it may be one of the few racial slurs that originated with a people's term for themselves. In Korean, guk means "country" and by extension a country's people; when it is not modified (cf. waiguk, outside country, foreigner) it is understood to be Korea or its peoples. Speakers of Chinese will recognize the word as having sintic origin (gúo, country, and wàigúo, foreign country, respectively, in Mandarin).
The term was appropriated by the Americans during the Korean war and used as a racial slur for Korean people in general, which must have been confusing to the Koreans (imagine someone using "American" as a slur for Americans to get an idea). Then, in Vietnam, the old "Asians are all the same" mentality prompted GIs to extend its meaning (imagine "American" being a racial slur for all white people, for example -- yes, I know many Americans aren't white, it's not a perfect analogy, deal with it).
Oh please... if Google wanted to distance itself from it, they could have done so long ago. "Sorry, mates, some of our employees fucked up, they've been fired and the offending code/product/database is now being pulled off the market until we build our own replacement."
The whole bullshit, including trying to get away with just deleting the original developpers' names, and press releases about "leveraging non-Google assets" is what's damning Google. It's not just that the original incident happened, it's that from there Google seemed to not even understand why it's bad and why the heck should they give a damn. The original incident may have been an individual developper's fuck-up, but from there it's Google and their corporate policies deciding how to deal with it. And how they _did_ chose to deal with it, frankly, stinks.
Yes, noone expects total mind control, but if _also_ the legal team is out of control and answers it in a way unrepresentative of Google, and _also_ the PR team is out of control and pulls a damning "we were just leveraging someone else's resources" statement on their own, etc, then, ffs, they have a problem. At some point you have to assume some responsibility and control, and not just hide behind not knowing what everyone else is doing. If you don't even know what your legal and PR teams are doing at all, even in a public incident, then you better assert some control real fast.
Additionally "do no evil" does imply a dose of responsibility there. You can't say, basically, "oh, the Mafia does no evil, it's just some of our members that we don't really mind-control, that are shooting people or fitting them with cement shoes." If the individual members are free to do evil, and get the company's full backing in some "we were only leveraging other people's resources" statement, then on what do you base that "do no evil" slogan any more?
RL "evil" isn't some "Black And White" game notion, involving actively hating all humanity and actively seeking to do harm, including self-harm, just for harm's sake. And no company does that overtly anyway, so if that's what Google is distancing itself from, then it doesn't say much.
RL "evil", including corporate evil, is more along the lines of not giving a damn about who gets hurt, if it helps you forward your own interests. It's not actively trying to poison a river just for the chuckle of seeing some people get sick, it's not caring who gets sick as long as you saved some money by just dumping your waste in the river. It's not actively trying to get some excuse to shoot some people as a Mafia don, it's about not giving a damn if it takes some corpses to forward your own interests in an area. If shooting some people to make an example is what works, so be it, it's as good a means to an end as any. Etc.
Or to get back to corporations, Enron too didn't make defrauding investors its whole purpose, it just didn't give a damn who gets hurt by their lies. It had no qualms even with advising its own employees to buy stock at a time when management was selling theirs. Again, not because some super-villain at the top had a chuckle at hurting employees, but because they didn't give a damn.
Basically it's not about having some principles to create as much suffering and destruction as possible, it's about lacking the principles and empathy to avoid doing it. That's what corporate evil is: simple sociopathic behaviour.
And if an organization doesn't give a damn at all about what its employees are doing, and who they're hurting, as long as they get the product out the door, then, congrats, it just lost all credibility for some "do no evil" claim. It just showed as much sociopathic tendencies as any other corporation, only maybe in a more decentralized fashion. You know, why have one sociopath at the top coming up with all evil schemes, when you can have a thousand sociopaths in lower positions encouraged to feel free to come up with their own heists.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Again, it is not the "known data" that is at question here, but the database as an object in its entirety.
Nobody is accusing Google of "copying Chinese characters", but rather of copying a specific collection that somebody has invested time and money in creating. This is not a corpus, but rather more like a dictionary. Anyone can create one, but google - which I have emminent respect for in other areas, but not this one - has decided to take somebody else's "dictionary" rather than creating their own. The compilation existed as somebody else's work. Likely google could have made an attempt to buy it. Equally likely, they could have produced a similar offering on their own. Instead, they chose to take another group's work and then denied both giving said group adequate compensation, or even that they had taken it from said group.
imagine someone using "American" as a slur for Americans to get an idea
Why imagine? Come to Europe! But make sure to say you're Canadian...
The person responsible for the copying has been sacked. ...
The person responsible for the sacking has been sacked...