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Google Translate will be upgraded using a "Neural Machine Translation" technique, starting with Chinese-English translation today:
Google has been working on a machine learning translation technique for years, and today is its official debut. The Google Neural Machine Translation [GNMT] system, deployed today for Chinese-English queries, is a step up in complexity from existing methods. Here's how things have evolved (in a nutshell). [...] GNMT is the latest and by far the most effective to successfully leverage machine learning in translation. It looks at the sentence as a whole, while keeping in mind, so to speak, the smaller pieces like words and phrases. It's much like the way we look at an image as a whole while being aware of individual pieces — and that's not a coincidence. Neural networks have been trained to identify images and objects in ways imitative of human perception, and there's more than a passing resemblance between finding the gestalt of an image and that of a sentence.
Interestingly, there's little in there actually specific to language: The system doesn't know the difference between the future perfect and future continuous, and it doesn't break up words based on their etymologies. It's all math and stats, no humanity. Reducing translation to a mechanical task is admirable, but in a way chilling — though admittedly, in this case, little but a mechanical translation is called for, and artifice and interpretation are superfluous.
The code runs on Google's homegrown TPUs. The Google Research Blog says that the technique will be applied to other language pairs in the coming months.
Google's Neural Machine Translation System: Bridging the Gap between Human and Machine Translation
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 29 2016, @11:19AM
I’m not sure I want to know that either…
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 29 2016, @11:25AM
Apply now to be a White House intern and you will have two possible futures. You will give head in both futures, but will it be cock or clam?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 29 2016, @11:54AM
You forgot the Reptilian future.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 29 2016, @12:25PM
In this case the clam is a sub-set of Reptilian.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 29 2016, @02:00PM
How about machine translating this?
(Score: 1) by Francis on Thursday September 29 2016, @01:37PM
Unless you're an English teacher or learned English as a secondary language, you probably wouldn't know the difference explicitly, but you almost certainly know the difference implicitly.
Perfect just means that the action has been completed and continuous means that it's still in progress. I'm not sure why we use the terms perfect and continuous when we use the terms perfect and imperfect for the same basic concept when dealing with other languages.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 29 2016, @02:39PM
Okay, I follow the words, but I'm still struggling to understand. Could you please provide examples? From the use of the word 'action', I'm guessing this has something to do with verb tense. If so, it would help to see something like this:
Similarly, "will lift", "lift", and "lifted."
Do those encompass the concepts? If so, please identify the "perfect" and the "continuous" (and whatever the third one is) — and if not, then better examples would be much appreciated!
(Score: 2) by schad on Thursday September 29 2016, @05:22PM
For the past ten minutes, I have been kicking the ball.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday September 29 2016, @06:44PM
15 minutes from now I will have been kicking the ball.
I hope that tomorrow I will look back on kicking the ball with pleasure.
15 minutes from now I ought to have been kicking the ball.
etc.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.