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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: 2) by KritonK on Thursday September 29 2016, @01:37PM
If i input
我隻氣墊船裝滿晒鱔
which I am assured [omniglot.com] means "my hovercraft is full of eels", I get:
I only hovercraft filled with eel.
It leaves a lot to be desired.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Francis on Thursday September 29 2016, @02:00PM
Looks like the original Chinese isn't right. The second character is wrong, it should be "我的氣墊船裝滿晒鱔" if you type that into the translator you get almost exactly the translation you would expect, and arguably completely correct.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 29 2016, @02:56PM
That's a problem with machine translations. If one character is off a machine destroys the entire sentence. A human, like yourself, can tell it was a minor mistake and can still correctly translate the intent. So the machines still need improvement.
(Score: 2) by jdavidb on Thursday September 29 2016, @08:15PM
That's a problem with machine translations. If one character is off a machine destroys the entire sentence
On the plus side, that sounds like a very effective hashing algorithm!
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(Score: 1) by Francis on Thursday September 29 2016, @09:13PM
Chinese is particularly problematic because they haven't discovered spaces between words. As a result word segmentation issues abound.
Most other languages have them. It's rather inefficient to have to mentally insert white space when reading and makes it hard to identify words.
Making things worse, the language has a ton of particles that aren't words, but are required for grammatical reasons.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Friday September 30 2016, @03:29AM
That's a false premise though. Not all human Chinese speakers would have caught that error, and many Chinese speakers are functionally illiterate.
Comparing the best of human performance against the worst of computer performance is hardly fair, and is denial at best, of the frightening potential of machine learning.
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(Score: 2) by moondrake on Thursday September 29 2016, @02:14PM
Well..there is Chinese and there is Chinese. I am by no means fluent but would translate the sentence as google did, even although I end up with nonsense (as if the original made much sense...). Then I followed your link and saw you copied a Cantonese sentence... Often the writing has roughly the same meaning though (even although the talking is unintelligible to me, and probably to most native mandarin speakers). But it is not the same.
Google does not seem to translate Cantonese. But it does translate the mandarin Chinese correctly.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday September 29 2016, @02:39PM
It would seem to count for both Simplified and Traditional, but it may not even work for the reverse English-Chinese pair yet. Another thing that could muddy the waters is that certain simple sentences seem to have been pre-checked by the "community":
https://translate.google.com/#en/zh-TW/This%20is%20a%20test. [google.com]
Click the green checkmark.
I'm surprised that Google isn't doing Cantonese. It looks like their strategy is to get others to do the hard work for them:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Cantonese/comments/2uwv54/google_has_listened_they_are_adding_cantonese_to/ [reddit.com]
https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/translate/w3jPNgOQD8s [google.com]
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