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Good point. I think the author quite clearly meant continuous wrt. a whole sentence or even text, not single (sparse) words, though. Take German, for example: T

by fnl 10y ago

Good point. I think the author quite clearly meant continuous wrt. a whole sentence or even text, not single (sparse) words, though. Take German, for example: The last word in a sentence that ends in a verb defines the whole structure of the sentence. Like, "Wir haben heute etwas über Neuronale Netzwerke gelernt.", which is in part also reflected in particularly problematic languages not being "projective". This gets even worse with "long-range" semantic cross-references, like anaphora. And, the latest Google Translate is still notoriously bad at the German language, at least [1]. Therefore, I think the article has a valid point, and I'd really like to hear some actual points where he is wrong before dismissing it (though, yes, I agree it is rather shallow, and best a good thought starter). [1] Google Translate on the German Wikipedia entry for Weihnachten (X-mas): https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&nv=1&rurl=translate.google.com&tl=en&u=https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weihnachten https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&...

nl 10y ago
Why do you say German is notoriously bad? I don't speak German, but that linked page reads fine to me, and their neural translation system has state-of-the-art performance for both English->German and German->English at least[1]. I would have thought that the well-structured nature of German makes it reasonably easy to translate, assuming you have a NN architecture with sufficient memory range. [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.04558 https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.04558
- fnl 10y ago
  The translation isn't "only nonsense", and in many cases even grammatically correct, but mostly semantically wrong, or rather weird. In any case, a long shot from a human translation. But I wouldn't agree that it's "quite good". And, this is the easy case. EN->DE works even worse.
Houshalter 10y ago
Doesn't German have a ton more compound words though? That could be an issue because their system is word based.
- vonnik 10y ago
  It does. In a way you face a parsing problem similar to Asian languages that don't use spaces to separate words.

by fnl 10y ago

nl 10y ago

Why do you say German is notoriously bad? I don't speak German, but that linked page reads fine to me, and their neural translation system has state-of-the-art performance for both English->German and German->English at least[1]. I would have thought that the well-structured nature of German makes it reasonably easy to translate, assuming you have a NN architecture with sufficient memory range. [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.04558 https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.04558

fnl 10y ago
The translation isn't "only nonsense", and in many cases even grammatically correct, but mostly semantically wrong, or rather weird. In any case, a long shot from a human translation. But I wouldn't agree that it's "quite good". And, this is the easy case. EN->DE works even worse.

Houshalter 10y ago

Doesn't German have a ton more compound words though? That could be an issue because their system is word based.

vonnik 10y ago
It does. In a way you face a parsing problem similar to Asian languages that don't use spaces to separate words.