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Google's New Translation Software Powered By Brainlike Artificial Intelligence (sciencemag.org)

sciencehabit quotes a report from Science Magazine: Today, Google rolled out a new translation system that uses massive amounts of data and increased processing power to build more accurate translations. The new system, a deep learning model known as neural machine translation, effectively trains itself -- and reduces translation errors by up to 87%. When compared with Google's previous system, the neural machine translation system scores well with human reviewers. It was 58% more accurate at translating English into Chinese, and 87% more accurate at translating English into Spanish. As a result, the company is planning to slowly replace the system underlying all of its translation work -- one language at a time. The report adds: "The new method, reported today on the preprint server arXiv, uses a total of 16 processors to first transform words into a value known as a vector. What is a vector? 'We don't know exactly,' [Quoc Le, a Google research scientist in Mountain View, California, says.] But it represents how related one word is to every other word in the vast dictionary of training materials (2.5 billion sentence pairs for English and French; 500 million for English and Chinese). For example, 'dog' is more closely related to 'cat' than 'car,' and the name 'Barack Obama' is more closely related to 'Hillary Clinton' than the name for the country 'Vietnam.' The system uses vectors from the input language to come up with a list of possible translations that are ranked based on their probability of occurrence. Other features include a system of cross-checks that further increases accuracy and a special set of computations that speeds up processing time."

88 comments

  1. Oh, a BRAINIAC? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Had one of those. Tubes blew all the time.

  2. What are vectors? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    We just don't know

    1. Re:What are vectors? by Arkh89 · · Score: 4, Funny

      I am just terrified right now.
      Wait until Google Research Scientists learn about matrices...

  3. I've fallen and secant get up by fyngyrz · · Score: 3, Funny

    You've gone off on a tangent. It's polarizing. Stop it. Right now.

    --
    I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
    1. Re:I've fallen and secant get up by chipschap · · Score: 3, Funny

      You've gone off on a tangent. It's polarizing. Stop it. Right now.

      You're making me tensor and tensor.

    2. Re:I've fallen and secant get up by fyngyrz · · Score: 2

      You're making me tensor and tensor.

      Well, if you were more coordinated, you'd feel better about it. Get my point?

      --
      I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
    3. Re:I've fallen and secant get up by skatefriday · · Score: 1

      I never have mod points when I actually want them.

    4. Re:I've fallen and secant get up by chipschap · · Score: 1

      I'm in line with your derivative meaning.

    5. Re:I've fallen and secant get up by fyngyrz · · Score: 1

      This conversation does seem to have a pretty high rate of change, doesn't it?

      --
      I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
    6. Re:I've fallen and secant get up by fyngyrz · · Score: 1

      You really shouldn't encourage me. :)

      --
      I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
    7. Re:I've fallen and secant get up by jamiesan · · Score: 1

      When you're delta prime hand, you should play it.

    8. Re:I've fallen and secant get up by fyngyrz · · Score: 1

      Are you talking about cardesian co-ordinates?

      --
      I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
  4. Test it with the following by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Take a reasonably complex document and translate it back and forth between two languages like 5 times. When/If the resulting document is still readable and preserves the content from the original document, I'll consider it their new system a success. Until then, automated translation is a pipe dream.

    The current version of google translate (and all other systems I've tried) fails spectacularly when doing this.

    1. Re:Test it with the following by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Do think that a chain of human translators would even be able to pass this kind of test?

    2. Re:Test it with the following by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Translating back and forth... forever.

      ))((

      Damn I gotta watch that again now.

    3. Re:Test it with the following by raymorris · · Score: 1

      Electric translition of exciting product of our company google writes true word all times.

    4. Re:Test it with the following by Godwin+O'Hitler · · Score: 3, Informative

      A real professional, conscientious translator will make sure their translation is unambiguous, even if the original isn't. We don't have the right to practise GIGO.
      So provided there were only conscientious professional translators in the chain, yes, they'd pass the test easily.
      Having said that, I don't believe the bouncy translation method is a good yardstick at all. A good translation isn't judged on its repeatability.

      --
      No, your children are not the special ones. Nor are your pets.
    5. Re:Test it with the following by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      A real professional, conscientious translator will make sure their translation is unambiguous, even if the original isn't.

      I don't see how that's possible. In general anyway. This can only work if the translator is explicitly told which of possibly several meanings is the one they are supposed to use. But then it's no longer ambiguous. And Google Translate already offers multiple choices in case of ambiguity. It doesn't necessarily do this well yet but it's there. So if you allow translators to get disambiguation clues, you gotta do that for GT too, in which case I suspect it'll be quite a bit more successful than just plain back-and-forth translation. (Though it'll certainly not be even remotely perfect even then)
      Otherwise, professional or not, there is no way they'll get it right all the time or even agree on The One Correct translation for a given ambiguous snippet.

    6. Re: Test it with the following by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      What kind of test is that? It'seems the kind of test the FNG would come up with at some SCRUM meeting. Idiots use scrum. Idiots do stupid things like this all the time. I'mean surrounded by idiots.
      This wouldn't happen if TRUMP was in charge.
      THANKS OBAMA!

    7. Re: Test it with the following by mbeckman · · Score: 1

      You don't see how it's possible for humans to do a better job translating than machines? You don't see that humans have the ability to understand the context of a document, to grasp its semantics and logical implications, and derive the meaning and intent of the author?

      You aren't, by any chance, a machine, are you?

    8. Re:Test it with the following by Jon+Peterson · · Score: 1

      Yes, they will. We used to do this for translating medical papers. The paper would go from English to Chinese and then that would be sent to a different translation company to be re-translated into English. The derived English would then be subject to the same level of clinical and copy editor review as the original. If it didn't pass the Chinese translation would be rejected.

      It's extremely expensive, but it can be done. We did this with millions of words, and it cost millions of pounds. No automatic translation would have stood a chance, because those machines aren't trained on clinical text. Hell, there isn't even enough translated medical text like that too use as a training corpus yet!

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      ----- .sig: file not found
    9. Re:Test it with the following by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      This depends strongly upon your definition of "perserves the content". Words and phrases often have no counterparts in other languages. So a translator will be forced to alter the sentence to preserve its sense. Translating back will very likely not translate back into the original word/phrase. Take for example "swan song". The origin of this term is from the ancient greeks, so it may be shared within European languages that share a lot of common culture (I quickly checked French: chant de cygne), but it is highly doubtful that there is an equivalent in Chinese or Japanese. So this would have to be translated something like "final performance". Translating back is unlikely to give back "swan song".

      I have been involved in some translations from French to English. Often the whole sentence has to be rewritten (word ordering, phrase ordering, etc) for it to make good sense in English. The inverse transformation is unlikely to be identical (for human or machine translators).

      Still, it can preserve meaning. It will never be 100%.There will always be ambiguities that each human (or machine) will judge differently.

      I can't wait to test out the French/English translations (where I can critique the translation) and play with it a bit.

    10. Re: Test it with the following by brilanon · · Score: 1

      With gills?

    11. Re: Test it with the following by mbeckman · · Score: 1

      Humans have a lifetime of cognitive learning to draw upon when translating. For example, consider this classic linguistic conundrum: "Fruit flies like a banana." Does it mean that fruit, in general, has the aerodynamic qualities of one class of fruit, the banana? Or does it mean that fruit flies, being insects that subsist entirely by eating fruit, particularly enjoy eating bananas?

      Humans can do this translation correctly every time.

      The classic response given by AI Researchers to this class of linguistic challenge has always been "Why, once we have enough facts stored in a computer, in appropriate clever structures massaged by surely simple algorithms, the ability to do this kind of task will just fall out as a natural consequence." It was assumed, from the dawn of AI in the 1950s, that once computers had some more speed and memory this sort of achievement would be easy to brute force by calculation alone.

      This turned out to be not true. So in the 1970s AI researchers, who still had no idea how humans do this sort of thing (or any other kind of cognition), said "Well, we don't know how people do it, but we have a dim idea how a brain is structured with neurons and synapses and whatnot, so let us simulate crude mathematical models of these "neural networks", and perhaps the AI corpus will magically start functioning like a human brain."

      Sadly, no. Nearly fifty years later and AI researchers are still no closer to replicating human cognition, either in understanding or in blind replication. We can do parlor tricks, yes, such as Google Translate. These tricks can even be useful. But they're still just table-driven automata, without consciousness, without cognition (which we don't understand at all anyway), and certainly without Intelligence, artificial or natural.

      I call this "Cargo Cult Science". Like the South Pacific Islanders who built stunningly accurate (but non-functional) bamboo replicas of aircraft, radios, and other technology artifacts left by WW2 soldiers who blipped through their lives, we don't have the foggiest inkling of how intelligence actually works.

      AI has failed, so far. No breakthroughs on the horizon, either. The "singularity" is just wishful thinking.

    12. Re:Test it with the following by Knee+Patch · · Score: 1

      Okay, but that is just a single pass from English->Chinese->English, and you admit that it is not always successful and might get rejected. The original proposal was FIVE TIMES, without the crib of being able to compare back to the original source at each step. Surely you will agree based on your experience with a "single pass" of this translation that if they went back and forth five times, never being able to reference back to an earlier version, that things would go off the rails.

  5. now i want to translate vector by turkeydance · · Score: 1

    to find out what it is

    1. Re:now i want to translate vector by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Way to wear you ignorance on your sleeve.

  6. Don't know what the "vector" is? by deathcloset · · Score: 4, Informative

    Sounds an awful lot like the WordNet similarity vector which is commonly used in semantic analysis and is a measure of the 'relatedness' of words - http://search.cpan.org/dist/Wo...

    1. Re:Don't know what the "vector" is? by phizi0n · · Score: 1

      The "we don't know exactly" quote wreaks of bad journalism. It was probably taken way out of context because the author didn't understand what they were being told or they asked a slightly different question than what they wrote.

    2. Re:Don't know what the "vector" is? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The "wreaks of bad journalism" simply reeks of poor spelling, or an over-reliance on the kind of spell-checker you can squeeze into a telephone.

    3. Re:Don't know what the "vector" is? by Half-pint+HAL · · Score: 2

      Given that it's a neural network, no-one's going to know precisely what the vector encodes, or quite what it "means", or what a vector would look like for a given word. I imagine that was what the researcher meant.

      --
      Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
    4. Re:Don't know what the "vector" is? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "squeeze into a telephone"?

      If you can't get good spell checking from a 2ghz quad core processor, 128GB SSD and 3GB RAM then I don't think you can get good spell checking.

    5. Re:Don't know what the "vector" is? by skatefriday · · Score: 1

      Yup. We were doing this at PointCast way back in 1996. The answer to the question, "What is a vector?" Shows an astonishing amount of ignorance on the part of the PR person paid to talk to the reporter.

    6. Re:Don't know what the "vector" is? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Sounds awful lot like Markov chaining.

    7. Re:Don't know what the "vector" is? by hraponssi · · Score: 2

      It sounds like WordNet, Word2Vec and bunch of other stuff in the area. It is actually described in quite detail in the article linked from the page in the summary: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1609.0814...

    8. Re: Don't know what the "vector" is? by brilanon · · Score: 1

      These are fuzzy sensorimotor integrators for food finding

    9. Re:Don't know what the "vector" is? by SpinyNorman · · Score: 1

      The summary is complete gibberish. For anyone interested, Google's own paper describing their NMT architecture is here:

      http://arxiv.org/abs/1609.08144

      and a Google Reseach blog entry describing it's production rollout (initially for Chinese-English) is here:

      https://research.googleblog.com/2016/09/a-neural-network-for-machine.html

      The executive summary is that this is a "seq2seq" artificial neural net model using an 8-layer LSTM (variety of recurrent neural network) to encode the source language into a representation vector, and another 8-layer LSTM to decode it into the target language. A lot of the performance improvement is in the details rather than this now-standard seq2seq approach.

      The "vector" being discussed doesn't represent words but rather the entire sentence/sequence being translated. This is the amazing thing about these seq2seq architectures - that a variable length sentence can be represented by a fixed length vector!

      The representation of words used to feed into this type of seq2seq model is often a wordvec/GloVe embedding (not WordNet), but per the Google paper they are using a sub-word encoding in this case.

    10. Re:Don't know what the "vector" is? by ole_timer · · Score: 1

      technically it's an eigenvector, journalists don't get that kind of training or exposure...

      --
      nothing to see here - move along
    11. Re:Don't know what the "vector" is? by ole_timer · · Score: 1

      by the way, that's how twitter analysis on different languages, for one example, is done.

      --
      nothing to see here - move along
  7. Bullspit by 110010001000 · · Score: 0

    This AI hype has to stop. Neural networks are nothing like how the brain works. We have known that since 1975 at least! The only thing more annoying than a space nutter is an AI nutter.

    1. Re:Bullspit by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I don't get it. Are you claiming that they haven't reduced translation errors by up to 87% by using neural network algorithms? Or are you just angry about the existence of the terms "neural networks" and "artificial intelligence"?

    2. Re:Bullspit by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      AI is dead since the nineties, where they ran into a wall. The wall is still there. "Neural" and "AI" are just used as marketing terms these days, it sounds better than some powerful, connected computers with software and data thrown at it.

    3. Re:Bullspit by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Personally my issue is calling "neural networks" "brain like", as neural networks were only named as such because of a horrifically misinformed understanding of how brains worked when neural networks were first named.

    4. Re:Bullspit by JustAnotherOldGuy · · Score: 2

      This AI hype has to stop. Neural networks are nothing like how the brain works. We have known that since 1975 at least! The only thing more annoying than a space nutter is an AI nutter.

      There you go again.

      AI-assisted translation is only going to get better and better and better as time goes on. It won't happen tomorrow or next week or next month, but come back in 5 years and I'd bet that it'll be a whole different ball game.

      As someone who saw the idea of a portable phone go from "pipe dream" to "something you can buy for $9.95 at Walmart", I've learned not to scoff or say stuff like this can't be done. It will be done, just not at the breathless pace the press releases would like you to believe.

      And that $9.95 phone? It also has a video camera, GPS mapping, accelerometers, a nice color display, and tons of other shit. You can do photo and video editing on it, send texts to the other side of the planet for free, and play all the silly games you could ever want on it. It has more computing power than the entire Department Of Defense had in 1960.

      If you had told most people about this in 1960 they'd have had you committed. So yeah, I believe some form of AI will happen. It's inevitable.

      --
      Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
    5. Re:Bullspit by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      To be fair "deep learning" is a concept that could potentially spell the doom of traditional AI programs. The first problem for AI is that these learning networks don't use internal representations to do the "thinking", they perform analog computations which are just as mystifying as biological brains, hence the "what is a vector? We don't know" comment. The second problem is that in order to train one of the networks how to do something, you have to create the lessons that teach the subject you want it to learn, which is exactly what we already do for teaching children - something which is itself very hard to do. Symbol processing mechanical intelligence is a dying dream.

    6. Re:Bullspit by Half-pint+HAL · · Score: 1

      To be fair, symbol-processing human intelligence is a dying dream -- just one of the mistakes that Piaget made.

      --
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    7. Re:Bullspit by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Those networks do use internal representations. Much of the research into such networks has been into how to know what the network knows, what are its internal representations.

    8. Re:Bullspit by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Well he had to come up with something to counteract the influence of Behaviorism. Skinner had to be stopped at all costs.

    9. Re:Bullspit by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Researchers will be looking for their precious internal representations, for their mental language, until the end of time. They need it to be there so they can upload their minds to a simulation and have eternal life. A world of pure form and beauty with Bostrom's superintelligent AI god watching over their mind-souls.

    10. Re: Bullspit by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Look, I get your point, but space nutters are hands down the worse kind of nutter. You can't hand wave that away like some kind of global warming nutter.
      Oh, wait...

    11. Re:Bullspit by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Well, I won't hold my breath. I'd suggest an electronic dictionary and thesaurus are much more useful, since you can determine the context for yourself and take a guess (and sometimes it can only be a guess) at the best translation. If machine translation discourages people from actually learning foreign languages, then to me it's an overall negative. As an aid to learning, fine.

    12. Re:Bullspit by mbeckman · · Score: 1

      Imagine I started calling a blender an "artificial digestive system" that mimics human digestion. Would you buy that? Not if you're a biologist. Where are the enzymes? Where are the biochemical pathways? Where is the nutrient separation and distribution network? Where, indeed, is the anus?

      Yet my blender claim is more accurate, by far, than the claim that Artificial Intelligence mimics biological intelligence. The operative word here is "intelligence." We're talking actual cognition, not pre-programmed reactions. No biologist calls a venus fly trap intelligent, even though it has enough cellular automation to catch and digest flies. An ant has the beginnings of intelligence, although we have very little understanding of how even this primitive life form cognates.

      Nobody is saying that computer emulation of various tasks that humans do is useful. It is useful. It just isn't intelligent. Not even as intelligent as an ant.

      Stanford AI researcher Andrej Karpathy wrote an excellent essay entitled The state of Computer Vision and AI: we are really, really far away. He summarizes how little we've accomplished in terms of AI's original goals. The piece was published in 2012, and AI hasn't moved a nanometer since.

    13. Re:Bullspit by JustAnotherOldGuy · · Score: 1

      The operative word here is "intelligence."

      Yes, defining "intelligence" is a key item here. What does it actually mean, and how can we say whether something is "intelligent" or not? It's a bit of a fuzzy area to say the least. Without a clear definition of what "intelligence" means, we're all just guessing.

      A couple of things:

      First, I think that a sufficiently sophisticated system could mimic intelligence even though it wouldn't actually be intelligent (whatever that means). No, it wouldn't be truly intelligent or genuine "AI", but it could be good enough to use for a lot of practical applications.

      Second, I do think that eventually we will develop some sort of genuine AI, in fact I think it's inevitable. But again, it's going to need to be defined as to what genuine AI is. What's the yardstick for determining whether or not it's really artificial intelligence? I think it would include the ability to learn, to make decisions that aren't pre-programmed or mechanically heuristic in nature, and the ability to potentially be somewhat illogical under the right conditions. Creativity (however you define that) would also be a component. Others would claim that it would have to include empathy and other "emotional" states.

      In short, it's a helluva thing just to define what "intelligence" means and how to detect it. But I do believe that some form of "real" AI will eventually happen, even if it's not what we imagine it would be like today.

      Again, how would we know whether or not to consider something as "intelligent"? What properties would it have to display to be labeled as such?

      --
      Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
    14. Re:Bullspit by mbeckman · · Score: 1

      By "mimic intelligence" I meant to operate in the same way biological intelligence does. Perhaps I should have said "replicate intelligence" to be totally clear. And you're right, we can't replicate something we can't take apart and explain.

      Your belief that we will eventually develop genuine AI seems premature, since we don't yet understand intelligence. What if, for example, the brain is just a transceiver that communicates with the true seat of intelligence, which happens to be in another dimension that we can't yet perceive scientifically? Science went millennia, for example, before detecting the phenomenon of radio waves, subatomic particles, and quantum mechanics.

      There simply is no proof that intelligence is materialistic, and plenty of evidence that it isn't (such as neuroplasticity, as seen in aphasic brain function reassignment). Yet AI researchers pointlessly bang away at this approach without having done their foundational homework.

      I think we should focus on defining intelligence rather than jumping to the end game of creating one.

    15. Re:Bullspit by JustAnotherOldGuy · · Score: 1

      I think we should focus on defining intelligence rather than jumping to the end game of creating one.

      I agree.

      At the same time, though, by attempting to mimic it or create it we may discover something along the way that helps us define it or understand it. If we needed to completely understand something before we tried to create it we'd be way behind where we are now in all sorts of fields. Sometimes the failures teach things that lead to successes.

      --
      Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
    16. Re: Bullspit by mbeckman · · Score: 1

      Precisely. Let's just not call it AI :)

    17. Re: Bullspit by JustAnotherOldGuy · · Score: 1

      Precisely. Let's just not call it AI :)

      But what if it is, and we don't realize it or recognize it?

      --
      Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
    18. Re: Bullspit by mbeckman · · Score: 1

      Then we'll just have this conversation with it, and ask it. :)

  8. tldr by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    They're doing context-aware translation based on massive well organized training sets and clever search algorithms. Woo.

  9. "rolled out" - to translate.google.com? by ffkom · · Score: 2

    Neither the Slashdot summary nor TFA contains a URL to where we can try this now rolled out new translator. Does this imply it's already used by translate.google.com? If so, I didn't notice any improvements, yet.

    1. Re:"rolled out" - to translate.google.com? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I'm sure Google know what a vector is, but the "meaning" of a particular language vector may be a meaningless notion.
      In that vein I show the latest google translation of an 18th century Chinese poem by the emperor at that time.
      [I think google must have changed something as I got quite a different translation a few weeks ago]...

      Queens Elder Vimmer
      Is not the students have the ability to supernatural powers
      The game does not show three circles
      A wife because of physical illness
      Saying that with the hi transfer
      Asked the rate does not allow the text
      The purpose of the line is not Buddha
      The Second Approach to Discrimination
      Silent without Lu, such as lactation
      Water does not exist in the whole map
      Xi only day girl scattered chat
      Complex Seoul Seoul

      Translation perfection seems still a distant goal.
      I cannot show the original Chinese for this (Slashdot Unicode limitation?), but it can be seen at https://goo.gl/TzKGv9
         

    2. Re:"rolled out" - to translate.google.com? by Half-pint+HAL · · Score: 1

      The first link in the summary is to Goole's blog. The first translation roolout is Chinese to English -- all such translations from now on will be carried out by our new connectionist translation overlords, and I for one welcome them. What I'm curious about is how it will handle languages than had insufficient data for old-style Google Translate's statistical translation engine. Will this do better, or will it be even more sensitive to small datasets?

      --
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    3. Re:"rolled out" - to translate.google.com? by Fwipp · · Score: 1

      It's rolled out for Chinese->English, with more on the way.

      The Google Translate mobile and web apps are now using GNMT for 100% of machine translations from Chinese to English—about 18 million translations per day. The production deployment of GNMT was made possible by use of our publicly available machine learning toolkit TensorFlow and our Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), which provide sufficient computational power to deploy these powerful GNMT models while meeting the stringent latency requirements of the Google Translate product. Translating from Chinese to English is one of the more than 10,000 language pairs supported by Google Translate, and we will be working to roll out GNMT to many more of these over the coming months.

  10. Language translate to Universial Network Language by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Universal Network Language (UNL) is a superset of all languages. It is a good idea but nothing about it is open source. But I would still like to see the conversion.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Networking_Language

  11. Let Me Know When... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Let me know when it can translate ebonics to American English.

  12. So basically to summarize... by jasonma84 · · Score: 0

    Google research scientist: We don't really know what a vector is per se but it sounded really smart when someone - don't know who scribbled it on the ping pong table in red sidewalk chalk next to the slide and wacky inflatable tube man. We were all munching down cheetos and drinking grape fanta at the time so everything is pretty blurry. It was at that moment that we realized the word 'hilary' should also be a vector although still unsure what a vector was, what kind of vector we were dealing with or or how deep into this vector one might need to go.

  13. Re:Language translate to Universial Network Langua by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    They are trying to create a language independent form of information, but all they will accomplish is creating a new language. Don't you people read Wittgenstein?

  14. Not be evil by ninthbit · · Score: 1

    Hopefully when Google's network becomes sentient, it will follow their "don't be evil" motto a little more closely then the humans running things.

    1. Re:Not be evil by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Maybe you should check how closely the similarity of the good and evil vectors?

  15. Re:Language translate to Universial Network Langua by Half-pint+HAL · · Score: 1

    No human brain could ever hope to process a grammar as "big" as UNL. And no, I've never read Wittgenstein. Although I did take that as my name for a German class once.

    --
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  16. From the Spanish examples... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    ... it still has some ground to cover.

    Corredor (in that case, an adjective -- running) was mistranslated as "corridor" -- though that's the kind of mistake a human might make.

    1. Re:From the Spanish examples... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Google translate has NEVER being any good. It is the only one that continues to translate words LITERALLY instead of translating by phrase.

      While not a fan of Microsoft, the best translating software available today is Bing Translate. While is not perfect, it is the one that translates most language the best. Translating most commonly used phrases correctly (or near enough) while Google Translate fails miserably in pretty much every single one of them.

  17. That's no good by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    If the system is training itself incorrectly, which it likely will as there are nuances of translation that can't really be inferred from hard data. Doesn't matter how fast it is or how much data it can access if the data ends up being flawed. I don't see this as a giant leap. Another exercise in coded masturbation from the, er . . . masters. Baters.

    1. Re:That's no good by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      If the system is training itself incorrectly, which it likely will as there are nuances of translation that can't really be inferred from hard data.

      Then it will be doing exactly the same thing that humans do.

  18. But can it pass the ultimate test? by BoogieChile · · Score: 1

    The test of the Lion-Eating Poet of the Stone Den?

  19. Google's New Translation Software by b783719 · · Score: 1

    Google Translate the following:

    "I ate steak at John's place" -> Chinese -> Russian -> French -> German -> Japanese -> Italian -> English

    "I ate the steak instead of John"

    Good enough from not getting eaten.

  20. Since we don't know how the brain works... by mbeckman · · Score: 3, Insightful

    How can this translation software be "brainlike"? Let's see... It doesn't translate the way human brains do...it produces results a small fraction of the quality a human brain produces...and, it can be fooled by trivial procedures like reverse-then-forward translation, where human brains are not fooled.

    I know brains, and those ain't no brains.

    1. Re:Since we don't know how the brain works... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      If you consider 9/10 to be a "small fraction" then you have some very different ideas about numbers from the rest of us.

  21. "Learning" is old translation technology. by aberglas · · Score: 1

    Maybe 25 years ago, the break through in machine translation was to use statistical techniques. The United Nation provided a nice, accessible corpus of texts manually translated to different languages for initial learning.

    Statistics is the old word for learning -- it is all about learning patterns from data.

    Maybe the the new version of Google is better, and maybe somewhere within it it actually uses an Artificial Neural Network, although tat would seem an odd use of that particular machine learning technology. But nothing fundamentally new that can be seen in the article.

    This article demonstrates slash dotter's complete lack of understanding of AI technologies beyond journalistic fluff. For a readable, high level overview have a look at

    http://www.computersthink.com/

  22. Nice, now stop spamming me... by Torp · · Score: 1

    ... with 'would you like to translate this page?' on every page.

    --
    I apologize for the lack of a signature.
  23. NOT by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    AI is still used by the mighty an powerful to scare the bejesus out of normal folks.

    Marvin Minsky, Elon Musk, brin, page and similar scammers use it to further their megalomanic goals. because in their bubble of humanity you are only of value if you do something extraordinary.

    fact is: ants have more powerful neural networks than googlers or teslanians or the MIT scammers.

  24. Minna onaji by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Hmmm... what if technologies and nature were the same thing...?

  25. Neural science, so exciting by brilanon · · Score: 1

    Zee Google search for your business and your business is a brain

  26. From the Bottom, but maybe not to the Top by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Google has lagged behind in translation for the entirety of its existence, but they also setup a search system that created SEO scammers before killing that. Toss up.

  27. can not can not can not can not by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    So, an Apple phone, then? Goes along with the "can't get good maps", can't use SD cards, can't sideload apps, can't have a radio?