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I think this may boil down to dedicated intelligence. Google Translate is an entire project devoted solely to efficient, human-useful text translation, where W
by Bartweiss 10y ago
I think this may boil down to dedicated intelligence. Google Translate is an entire project devoted solely to efficient, human-useful text translation, where Watson is a more general-purpose language processor. Certainly Watson must have dedicated translation logic, but I would be surprised if there are any narrow domains where Watson beats strong single-purpose competitors.
- pesenti 10y agoWe do have a team dedicated to Machine Translation (the same team that actually introduced the statistical approach - the "IBM Models" - in the 90s) but that team had been focused more on non-European languages. If you search the literature you will find that the IBM team is leading for languages like Arabic and Chinese but trailing for European language. We are working on that.
- Bartweiss 10y agoThis is a really interesting response, thank you (and thanks for answering so many questions in this thread). That result makes a lot of sense - Google has been working with the huge corpus of English-European translations (e.g. UN reports) and getting impressive results largely because there's so much data available with such direct equivalences. Just based on personal experimentation, they're much less capable with longer "translation distances" like phonogram<-->logogram and Indo-European<-->Sino-Tibetan. I didn't know IBM was leading on those long-distance translations, that's cool to hear.