Slashdot Mirror
Universal Translators?
bughunter writes
"Carnegie Mellon University
is announcing a 'spontaneous' translation system that allows speakers
of different tongues to converse in natural language in
real time. " I never liked the
idea of putting aquatic creatures in my ear anyway.
Surely the whole point of the babelfish was that everyone had to have one?
At least you can share this around......
Those are cool..
The story goes that an English visitor to Germany in the 19th century went to see a political debate with Otto von Bismarck, with her translator in tow. The debate went on, with Bismarck himself saying nothing, until finally he rose to speak at length about some minutely detailed point of law. The visitor craned forward to hear her translator, who for quite some time said nary a word--until the visitor became impatient and asked what Bismarck was saying, to which the translator replied, "Please, madam, I am waiting for the verb!"
QED.
Ethelred
Everyone wants to be Ethelred. Even I want to be Ethelred.
Jesus, that must have been really hard!
Now all we have left is the few hundred "other" languages that make up 80% of the worlds population.
After that, we can call it "universal". Most of us are so tied up with our own existance that we forget that 90% of the population has never made a phone call...
Yeah, assuming it works. I'd still rather see
us all learning a common _second_ language such
as esperanto.
Note: I said second language - not all learning
a common language.
Look at http://www.esperanto.org if you're not familiar with esperanto.
90% of the wealth is in 2% of the pockets. Bummer to be in the majority.
I worked on this exact project as a Freshman doing programming for the data collection group. I used the software a couple of times back then, 5 years ago. It didn't like my accent at the time and only got about 80% speech recognition for me. The amazing thing is the concept identifaction stage. Even with getting 20% of my words wrong it NEVER in tw hours of testing got my meaning wrong. They were talking about 93% accuracy for this stage when I was working there. I am sure it is even better today.
Yes the speech out isn't the greatest maybe, but remember this is a research project and the goal wasn't to produce a nice sounding translator. They were showing that you can do accurate real time translation. I am sorta interested to see how good their software has become in the last four years.
I don't want voice-to-voice translation. I want a unit that I can carry around, the size of a Palm Pilot, which, when someone speaks in a language other than English, prints out what they said.
I want the benefit of hearing the voice of the person who is speaking, but reading what they actually said on my translator unit.
This voice-to-voice stuff turns me off. I want realtime real-life subtitles!
if (strcmp("John kicked the bucket", str)==0)
.
.
.
printf("Jan ging de pijp uit\n");
else
Other difficulties, which can be much harder than idioms, are the following:
And there are the problems which occur in any Natural language program, resolving ambiguities and context being the main one.
In my experience, it isn't hard to create an MT-system that solves one of these problems. It's putting them together and still have a relatively good system that's the tough part.
Naw. Get everyone an IPv6 number...or a few...
I can't imagine the general public ever grasping the need for a universal language. Most of the US thinks that english is.
So far I have never seen an automatic translater
...
:"He's masturbating"
that doesn't screw up. I bet that even this one
can make ridiculous translations.
Enter "Washington Post" at
http://babelfish.altavista.com
and get it to translate in French.
The translation is "Le poteau de Washington"
poteau like in electrical post or fence post.
Some other translation I've heard before :
"Eventail de course" for "Racing fans"
Eventail is a fan allright but
"He's shaking it" ---> "Il se branle"
A french would hear
As for asking the travel agent to talk into it...we could carry smart cards (or whatever) with profiles of our voice/accent. That way, it doesn't have to build a database about you...just grab it from the card.
It would be relatively simple to say both of the possible meanings. In that specific case, "body" can be used to mean corpse as well, so the still simpler solution of always using "body" presents itself.
These are *MY* opinions.
They will not be *YOUR* opinions until the Orbital Mind Control Lasers are operati
Let's sneak some funny code into the Chinese-English version at the next summit. For example we could replace the code for "unclear" with the code for "nuclear", then watch the wackiness unfold!
Hopefully they won't make it as hard to get as that stupid fish was. Argh!!!!
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Try 50 years or more! One of the reasons governments started putting money into computers in the early days was for automatic translation.
Just to see what it'd do, I took this phrase and passed it through each of the languages Babelfish supports, and then had it translate that back to English. The results:
Not as funny as the famed English-Russian-English translation, but still interesting. (Note that it came closest with the translation through German, probably because English is more closely related to German than to the other languages.)
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
Every article and schematic I have seen are little more than glorified electrolysis with deuterium.
I still believe its possible though. We are just missing something.
http://www.eskimo.com/~billb/freenrg/fnrg.html
As a holder of a BA in Linguistics, I am highly skeptical of such a device between two closely related languages, much less anything more than a tiny fraction of the 6,000+ languages in existance. Humans will be employed in this regard for a VERY long time, I can assure you.
-- Liquor up front, poker in the rear.
Even supposing amazing breakthroughs were to occur changing ones voice would be easier than by machine (I myself do american, scottish, jamaican, japanese, a little aussie and brit). It would take time to learn it, but here is why it is highly improbable:
First, detection and confiscation. Upon standard xray and hand search unless it was very small(nanotech) or organic(bio-engineered) and not of unusual exotic compounds(which can be scanned for) it could be found.
My main thought in this is that the local tyrants would not want this technology in unaffiliated hands(I.E. anybody they cannot control).
From simple xenophobic tendancies to straight out evasion or the girls lockeroom. You cannot lose.
The NSA have been doing it for a long time you know. The TELINT project was started for just that reason in the seventies. Have you any idea how many NLP scientists NSA employ?
Think about it. We have devices that take our words and convert them to text (dragon dictate, etc). Let's say you had a mic running that in to a buffer. Then we have products (like babelfish )that will convert the text to a new language. Add in a speech program (http://www.bell-labs.com/project/tts/voices.html) , and it doesn't really seem like such a leap.
Not to say what they did wasn't great, and I'm sure there was a lot more involved, but it is within the realm of the possible.....
Colin Davis
The problem with Esperanto is that it's so *horribly* ugly. I guess it's ugly as only designed languages can be, and this particular one seems designed for ugliness (Tolkien made up some languages which are both euphonic and look good on the page. Esperanto is neither).
If the solution is that everybody learns the same second language, what's wrong with English? I did that, and it's working for me.
"Be nice, veer left, and never stop thinking" Iain Banks - Walking On Glass
They'll just pretend to only understand a language that is not supported by the translator :-)
This is russian speaking.
Expression does exist between jail convicts and teens, but fairy tale does not. He made it up.
Yuri,
yk@altavista.net
you are right, there was an earlier CSTAR-I demonstration around 1995. The upcoming
demo is C-STAR-I and it now can handle spontaneous speech, way more flexible parsing techniques and way more languages.
This is a very difficult thing for a translator to do, even within the same language. You've not only got to deal with exaggerationsl, but inverse meanings.
-Imperator
Gates' Law: Every 18 months, the speed of software halves.
I'm not Russian, and I don't speak Russian, but I learned of this phrase from a fairy tale.
The village idiot in some small town did something weird and ended up castrating some wizard guy. This pissed the wizard off, so he cursed the idiot with a flying penis that would follow him around. When the village idiot noticed what it was, he started laughing moronically. At that moment, the penis flew into his mouth and gagged him. (Maybe killed him, I don't remember.)
Thus, "Don't go catching any flying penises in your mouth." (Phonetically "Vof-lee luv-it," I think.) becomes, "Don't act like the village idiot." Or "Don't act like you don't know what's going on."
-Robby
Curiosity?!? My ass! He stole shit! -T. Carpenter
Now all it needs to do is make the peoples lips move at the same time like in star trek.
I couldn't even make through half the posts here. Much bitching about how the system can't possibly do true real-time, accurate translation from any given language to any other. Duh. The point here is these people are setting up a focused, usable system for use by perhaps two groups: high-level diplomats who probably speak more than one language apiece and thus can tweak their use of colloqialisms as needed, and tourists who will not be using the system to get the latest guffaw local stories but rather to find food, shelter, and locations of interest. Such applications tend to restrict the vocab needed and countries involved.
Queens of the Stone Age - they rule
> Until you have good algorithms, all the Beowulf
> clusters in the world aren't going to do you a
> damn bit of good...
Well, that might not be true. AI research constantly butts its collective head against NP-complete problems. If we had non-deterministic machines (which people are working on, and probably at a faster pace than any proofs of P=NP), it would bring new life to the subject. My college AI textbook was filled to the brim with heuristics for avoiding exponentially large computation in what were essentially NP-complete problems.
But in the context of that guy's post, I agree with you. Moore's law is a false hope here.
"Whatever happened to fair use?"
-- Duff-Man
> we all need to talk either scientific journal
> like precission, or only allowed limited
> extravagance scripts. let's just say we all talk
> like greek drama actors.
Unfortunately, that wouldn't solve it either. Strange and complex sentences can be built up even from proper English. Take the sentence "Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this sun of York." The word "sun" is a pun here. The "son of York", the son of a guy whose last name is "York", has just won the War of the Roses. But "sun of York" describes the change in weather from winter to summer. This weather change, in turn, mirrors the change in the social climate of England from war to peace. Translating that sentence to (for example) French, and keeping all the nuances, is something that human translators can do better than computer translators. Doing this by machine would entail writing programs with deep understanding of the nuances of the languages and of the subject matter being described.
In another example, the first two lines of Camus' The Stranger, originally written in French, translate to: "Mother died today. Or was it yesterday?". However, the original nuances of the French words Camus used in that sentence, and the context of the novel as a whole, would be better represented by the translation "Mommy died today. Or was it yesterday?". This is a small difference, but an important one for a good translator.
The problem isn't necessarily the vocabulary used. It's the meaning of words, taken in context, that is hard to figure out.
Actually, it would be quite cool if it adapted to the wearers voice and made it sound like them with a foreign accent..
Cool, but how does it SOUND? All the computer speach products I've heard sound very monotonous.
It would come in real handy at those Star Trek conventions for people who don't want to go to the trouble of learning Klingon.
I wonder if it does a better job than AltaVista's babelfish.
I think I remember hearing about this a couple of years ago when I took a linguistics class. At the time, it was a "translating telephone", as far as I remember. Or was that a different project altogether? Anyone know?
:)
The idea of a translating electronic tour guide is a good way of merging research with business sense, though--just imagine how much sponsorship they could get from people who want access to prototypes
-Brad Keryan
keryan+spam@andrew.cmu.edu
Now, I want a phaser and warp accelerators.
The concept of foreign accents is really relative to the listeners own views. A tourist from Germany will probably have a German accent according to your POV but to another German, it's considered "normal" (according to the German). The device probably could mimic "foreign accents" though by default it probably wouldn't, especially when accurate translation holds precident (sp?) due to limitations in processing power. As for customizable voices, the device could just be adjusted for pitch.
rather have the fish in my ear. Next thing you know they will try to come up with a replacement for towels...
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
People have been working toward this kind o fthing for a long time , with slow and painful successes . They are still no where near having a reliable solution . A friend ( and member of our LUG ) is a Mathematical Linguist and works on Automated Machine Translation software . His comments over the last year give me good reason to be skeptical .
...
I am betting that this turns out to be the kind of thing that voice to text did . Wonderful idea , almost worked first time out . Almost worked two years later . Almost works five years later . Still wouldn't waste my time with it now .
Besides , who wants to wisper sweet nothings through a throat box
Your squire
Squireson
Okay, so it can handle colloquialisms, but what does it do with them?
Does it do a literal translation of the colloquialism? (Russian phrase "Don't go catching any flying penises in your mouth.") Or does it try to find the closest idiom in the other language? (Said Russian phrase would best be translated, "Don't act stupid, like you don't know what's going on." It's from a Russian fairy tale.)
Also, one encounters the possibility of there being no equivalent phrase. And what about weighted concepts? Many Asian languages, due to cultural influence, have an inherent extra emotional meaning attached to declarations of honor, but there is no easy way to translate this into English.
This sounds like a HUGE step forward, but I'm still gonna be skeptical and double check machines with people.
Curiosity?!? My ass! He stole shit! -T. Carpenter
Just out of curiosity I checked out their home page. Then I searched for cold fusion.
Hmmm, I think "EurekAlert" doesn't have a very rigorous review process.
One question: How will this effect those people who like to get away with things by pretending they don't understand english?
---
seumas.com
I really don't know, I've had a tough time studying all those Chomsky-ish phrase structure grammars and non Chomsky-ish categorial grammars...
;)
Anyway, deriving semantics from phonological information (speech -> phonemes -> morphemes -> lexemes -> semantics) and then converting back into another language never seemed to me as a trivial task.
The plethora of phenomena in language are just intimidating.
I still doubt it's an AI-complete problem
--exa--
but will it allow me to understand 'women talk' as well? Nnow that would be an acheivement.
"I just can't sit while people are saying nonsense in a meeting without saying it's nonsense" J Watson, Sci Am 288:(4)51
If that was sarcasm ignore this but...
I'm pretty sure that slang won't be given up just for this. English's ability to constantly evolve is why it is now the international language.
Also, you do realize "got to" & "ought'a" are slang right?
if it cant learn new words, its pointless.
"It's easy to wreck a nice beach"
:)
That's all I've got to say
Well...it doesn't *need* the lag time... :-)
:-)
Machine:
John goes....no, wait...Mary goes to John....I take that back, Mary goes to John's girlfriend's house....it's an ugly house....
Why, we could make the thing sound human!
Hey! What's wrong with Babelfish? They don't cause any problems and they're highly cross platform (all you need is an ear of some sort). Sure they may not be avaliable in stereo yet, but who needs stereo when talking to a Vogan anyways.
I did my MA in linugistics with a specialization in NLP (natural language parsing). I'm really curious as to how this system deals with input outside of its known range (vocabulary) and accounts for that. When a computer can accurately syntactically and semantically parse a sentence (figure out what words are what and what they mean), *then* I'll be impressed, but if this thing is for real, the phonologist in me is already quite floored, knowing how difficult this stuff is and how much more complex language is than people tend to think (whew! run on...)
I guess Ray Kurzweil is right -- this stuff is coming faster than we expect.
Is there a delay between the uttered "foreign" speech and the translated version or what? Wouldn't this either result in either extremely lenghty conversations or confusing overlap?
Hmm. I wonder whether the original speech could be masked so that it wasn't audible. A little chip could record the wave patterns of the speaker and chirp out their inversion. Original + inversion = silence. That would be so sci-fi!
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
It's not the machine...
It's the language..*l*
It got to stop evolving, and people ought'a quit using slang and metaphors...
we all need to talk either scientific journal like precission, or only allowed limited extravagance scripts. let's just say we all talk like greek drama actors.
Even human speaks in similar language sometimes have problem, ever saw a granparents wince listening to teenage slang?
Me? I already thinking of a million funny sentence to feed into the universal translator, just to see if it will offend all political buffons at the same time.
Yeah, that Nasa/Odessa/Nato triumverate could use these devices to turn ordinary tourists who want to speak in the language native to the country they're in into Ninja killer drones. Very upsetting indeed.
-Zen I'm gonna make the _world_ my bitch.
The way these things work is, since they are in such a restricted domain, (in this case ordering plane tickets and the like), it isnt impossible to give the machine a fairly complete picture of all possible tacks a conversation at a ticket desk might go. It can then use this internal, and fairly complete, model of its domain to get a model of the meaning of the conversation. This intermediate step into an 'interlingual' model means that internally it doesnt need to care what language you want it to speak in.
Plug in a module to translate from an interlingual response to eg French, et voila, the computer will respond in French. Translating _out_ is much easier than translating _in_, since you already have a precise representation of the response internally; but translating _in_ is made much easier as you dont need the machine to understand the entirety of the language.
This is all a bit glib, and I'm not knocking the achievement; I'm just putting some perspective on what's been done. IANAL(ingistics researcher) ;o) . Anyway, what I'm trying to say is: the only reason they are making any progress is by restricting the domain to one where the conversations are simple and well-understood. That way, they can do a *far* better job than the Babelfish, but its not Star Trek technology yet.
> A long time? What's this amount to, 15 or 20 > years? It's not like this is a project that has > eluded humanity for centuries.
Actually, it kind of is... software is just the latest and best tool in this quest.
> Breakthroughs are always just around the corner.
> Maybe your friend has given you good reason to
> play skeptic. The again, maybe he's not the one
> who makes the breakthrough.
Oh, bullshit. Some reasonable skepticism is always healthy. It's not like his friend has given up trying.
> By the power of Greyskull! I invoke Moore's Law!
*sigh*
When will you people learn that these things aren't just a matter of throwing more CPU at the problem? You need better algorithms first.
Until you have good algorithms, all the Beowulf clusters in the world aren't going to do you a damn bit of good...
---
DNA just wants to be free...
Maybe I'm being too skeptical. The article says the demo will be on Thursday, July 22. But it does not specify which year.
Dude, learn to count. Minnimum 5 BILLION people on this planet. There are, at most, 1.5 billion.
I dunno where you went to school, and I didn't do well in math, but my calculator tells me that's not 1/2, or 50% either.
While I think that you're probably right about more than 10%, I don't think it's much higher. When you get to 50%, that's something. By that time, ~6 billion, half that is 3bil.
Shit, we need more telephone numbers
bye
Dan
Translation, especially online, is a damn hard thing to do. I've studied with one of translation pioneers and have heard many stories of a multimillion dollar demo that concludes by translating 'Hello' into 'thirteen'. Part of it is the fact that translation is 'interlingua' based, where 'interlingua' is some hypothetical 'language of the mind', which presumably uses grammar to verbalize some of world knowledge. Now, the computer has no word knowledge. This is going to sound like babelfish - at best, a little bit usable... That's my 5 cents. I hope I'm wrong anyway, this would be great technology.
This would be an amazingly cool thing---if it worked. We'll have to wait for the demo to know for sure, but call me skeptical. There are too many jobs this system would have to perform, each of which is a potential point of failure. Here's a brief rundown:
My concern is that each of these things will introduce substantial error; and further that the SotA in speed is not the same as the SotA in quality, so that in order to do real-time translation, the quality degrades even further.
Another, more cynical/paranoid concern, is the fact that (most of) the conversation will be between people who are, presumably, prepped for it. They can be told to speak slowly and in a clear voice (which is reasonable enough, I suppose), to restrict their vocabulary (which is not reasonable), and to limit their interaction to certain other languages (also not reasonable). The Heidelberg man-on-the-street (Straßenmann? ;) conversations should be more informative in this regard. But I wonder if their system can actually handle translations between any two languages, or only certain combinations? And if they can translate between any two, do they use a "hub-language" or translate directly? Two clicks at babelfish can show you just how much further the former would degrade the quality....
Oh well. I'll certainly keep my eyes open for the results of the demo. Are any slashdotters going to be there? Make sure to post your impressions. :)
``This, too, shall pass.'' ---Eastern proverb
Hmmm, very revealing... According to the CMU website, the system (presumably Janus) is limited domain, which certainly makes things much easier. Still pretty cool, though.
I'd take this with huge lumps of salt, thank you.
First of all: since when even *recording* speech
to text has been solved? Without the text form
translating between languages sounds like hogwash.
Oh yes, we humans can do it, witness simultaneous
translation in UN and so, but a machine doing it
now? Maybe in few decades or so when they work out about gazillion big and small problems in speech processing and natural language processing, let alone translating. But now? Rubbish.
A long time? What's this amount to, 15 or 20 years? It's not like this is a project that has eluded humanity for centuries. Breakthroughs are always just around the corner. Maybe your friend has given you good reason to play skeptic. The again, maybe he's not the one who makes the breakthrough. By the power of Greyskull! I invoke Moore's Law!