Google remains one of the leading providers of
artificial intelligence especially in the area of assisted language
translation, and recently the company announced a break through in research, and claims to have found a new technique and it is vastly improving the results.
artificial intelligence especially in the area of assisted language
translation, and recently the company announced a break through in research, and claims to have found a new technique and it is vastly improving the results.
The company’s AI team calls it the
"Google Neural Machine Translation system", or
(GNMT), In simple terms, all it does is initially provided a less resource-
intensive way to ingest a sentence in one
language and produce that same sentence in
another language. Instead of doing it the long way of digesting each
word or phrase as a standalone unit, The GNMT takes in the entire
sentence as a whole.
"The advantage of this approach is that it
requires fewer engineering design choices than previous Phrase-Based translation systems,"
writes Mike Schuster, a researcher on the Google Brain team.
When the technique was first employed, it was able
to compete with the accuracy of it's predecessors. Over time, however,
GNMT has proved capable of both beating the old systems by producing superior results and also working at faster speed
required of Google’s consumer apps and services.
The Google team says its GNMT system is even approaching human-level translation accuracy in some cases. In cases that involves translations from languages, like
from English to Spanish and French. However,
Google is eager to gather more data especially for
"notoriously difficult" languages all of which
will help its system learn and improve over
time.
Google also started using its GNMT
system for 100 percent of Chinese to English machine translations in the Google Translate
mobile and web apps, which accounts for around 18 million translations per day.
from English to Spanish and French. However,
Google is eager to gather more data especially for
"notoriously difficult" languages all of which
will help its system learn and improve over
time.
Google also started using its GNMT
system for 100 percent of Chinese to English machine translations in the Google Translate
mobile and web apps, which accounts for around 18 million translations per day.
Google however admits that it still has a long way to go before GNMT is perfect. "GNMT can still make significant errors that a human translator would never make, like mistranslating proper names or rare terms," among other things. But Google’s believes through it's services our phones may be capable of breaking down all language barriers in the nearest future.
