Tag: english

US Intelligence seeks a universal translator for text search in any language

Enlarge / “Domain: space. Subject: female energy clouds.” (credit: Paramount) The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency (IARPA), the US Intelligence Community’s own science and technology research arm, has announced it is seeking contenders for a program to develop what amounts to the ultimate Google Translator. IARPA’s Machine Translation for English Retrieval of Information in Any Language (MATERIAL) program intends to provide researchers and analysts with a tool to search for documents in their field of concern in any of the more than 7,000 languages spoken worldwide. The specific goal, according to IARPA’s announcement, is an “‘English-in, English-out’ information retrieval system that, given a domain-sensitive English query, will retrieve relevant data from a large multilingual repository and display the retrieved information in English as query-biased summaries.” Users would be able to search vast numbers of documents with a two-part query: the first giving the “domain” of the search in terms of what sort of information they are seeking (for example, “Government,” “Science,” or “Health”) and the second an English word or phrase describing the information sought (the examples given in the announcement were “zika virus” and “Asperger’s syndrome”). So-called “low resource” languages have been an area of concern for the intelligence and defense communities for years. In 2014, the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) launched its Low Resource Languages for Emergent Incidents (LORELEI) project , an attempt to build a system that lets the military quickly collect critical data—such as “topics, names, events, sentiment, and relationships”—from sources in any language on short notice. The system would be used in situations like natural disasters or military interventions in remote locations where the military has little or no local language expertise. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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US Intelligence seeks a universal translator for text search in any language

Google’s Chinese-to-English translations might now suck less

Mandarin Chinese is a notoriously difficult language to translate to English, and for those who rely on Google Translate to decipher important information, machine-based tools simply aren’t good enough. All that is about to change, as Google today announced it has implemented a new learning system in its web and mobile translation apps that will bring significantly better results. As a native speaker (and reader and writer) of both Mandarin Chinese (both complex and traditional alphabets) and English, I’ve often cringed at Google Translate’s output. But looking at the examples provided by Google on its blog post , I am impressed. The new system uses what the company calls Google Neural Machine Translation (GNMT), which looks at entire sentences as it decodes instead of breaking them up into words and phrases to be considered independently. The latter method often resulted in disjointed results that sometimes didn’t make sense. According to the company, this new technique is better, because “it requires fewer engineering design choices than previous Phrase-Based translation systems.” It still breaks up sentences into individual characters, but now considers each one in relation to those before and after it. This is especially important in a language such as Mandarin, wherein words can mean different things based on the characters they are paired with. Chinese to English is just one of 10, 000 language pairs that Google Translate supports, and the company says it will be working to roll out GNMT to more translations “over the coming months.” Of course, machine translation still isn’t perfect — there are plenty of nuances that algorithms simply can’t pick up on, regardless of how well neural-based artificial intelligence is doing . But at least now, with the new system, the meaning will hopefully be lost in translation, not lost in Translate. Source: Google

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Google’s Chinese-to-English translations might now suck less

How English describes color vs how Chinese describes color

Here’s a fascinating visualization created by Muyueh Lee that shows the differences between how the English language and Chinese language each describe colors. On the left, you can see the number of English names for color hues (there’s a lot!) and on the right, the number of Chinese names (there’s a little!). Read more…

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How English describes color vs how Chinese describes color