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."
Had one of those. Tubes blew all the time.
We just don't know
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.
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.
to find out what it is
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...
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.
They're doing context-aware translation based on massive well organized training sets and clever search algorithms. Woo.
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.
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
Let me know when it can translate ebonics to American English.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
... 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.
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.
The test of the Lion-Eating Poet of the Stone Den?
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.
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.
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/
... with 'would you like to translate this page?' on every page.
I apologize for the lack of a signature.
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.
Hmmm... what if technologies and nature were the same thing...?
Zee Google search for your business and your business is a brain
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.
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?