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Microsoft Announces Breakthrough In Chinese-To-English Machine Translation (techcrunch.com)
A team of Microsoft researchers announced on Wednesday they've created the first machine translation system that's capable of translating news articles from Chinese to English with the same accuracy as a person. "The company says it's tested the system repeatedly on a sample of around 2,000 sentences from various online newspapers, comparing the result to a person's translation in the process -- and even hiring outside bilingual language consultants to further verify the machine's accuracy," reports TechCrunch. From the report: The sample set, called newstest2017, was released just last fall at the research conference WMT17. Deep neural networks, a method of training A.I. systems, allowed the researchers to create more fluent and natural-sounding translations that take into account broader context that the prior approaches, called statistical machine translation. Microsoft's researchers also added their own training methods to the system to improve its accuracy -- things they equate to how people go over their own work time and again to make sure it's right.
The researchers said they used methods including dual learning for fact-checking translations; deliberation networks, to repeat translations and refine them; and new techniques like joint training, to iteratively boost English-to-Chinese and Chinese-to-English translation systems; and agreement regularization, which can generate translations by reading sentences both left-to-right and right-to-left. Zhou said the techniques used to achieve the milestone won't be limited to machine translations. The researchers caution the system has not yet been tested on real-time news stories, and there are other challenges that still lie ahead before the technology could be commercialized into Microsoft's products. You can play around with the new translation system here.
The researchers said they used methods including dual learning for fact-checking translations; deliberation networks, to repeat translations and refine them; and new techniques like joint training, to iteratively boost English-to-Chinese and Chinese-to-English translation systems; and agreement regularization, which can generate translations by reading sentences both left-to-right and right-to-left. Zhou said the techniques used to achieve the milestone won't be limited to machine translations. The researchers caution the system has not yet been tested on real-time news stories, and there are other challenges that still lie ahead before the technology could be commercialized into Microsoft's products. You can play around with the new translation system here.
TFS is missing the important test of accuracy: translate Chinese > English, then back to Chinese. Will any Chinese person be able to understand it? Go back and forth twice for a more serious serious test. If you can't get access to Microsoft's software you can easily try this test with existing software. The results can be comical if your business doesn't depend on accuracy.
...omphaloskepsis often...
It's not reasonable as a test set if it's chosen to be stuff that's easy to translate. I just tried some Chinese assembly instructions, and it's terrible. And I don't mean the technical stuff, I mean the introduction:
Original:
(SNIP - the chinese characters won't work here. Alas for unicode.)
Microsoft:
Structure assembly, according to a certain order, the relevance of parts to subcontract; a total of eight subcontracts, from A1 to A8, the same package of parts are related, after assembly will constitute a machine components; in order to improve efficiency, to avoid confusion, please do not mix the different packages of parts all open after mixing together!!!!
Actual:
The structure is assembled in a certain order with parts relevant to each subsystem. There are a total of eight parts packages, from A1 to A8, each package related to a particular subsystem. In order to assist assembly and avoid confusion, please do not mix parts from the different packages.
This isn't particularly technical writing. About the most complex word is subsystem, and even if you give them that as a mulligan, their translation is still almost incomprehensible. Definitely not natural english as they claim.