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> We have all the conceptual understanding necessary to translate between human languages. Except that we don't. The original Google Translate used the concept

by kobeya 10y ago

> We have all the conceptual understanding necessary to translate between human languages. Except that we don't. The original Google Translate used the conceptual modeling approach to translation, and it was absolute shit for any non-closely related language pairs. Google Translate (and Baidu, etc.) now uses deep networks whose operations are rather opaque. We don't understand in detail how they work. But that didn't stop us from building them.

adrusi 10y ago
In context, that claim was an explanation of what I was trying to get at with the phrase "conceptual understanding". We don't have a conceptual understanding of language. We do have a conceptual understanding of how to translate between human languages — Proof: we can translate between human languages. If you think that's not adequate proof then you're disagreeing with me on the semantics of "conceptual understanding". If you have an alternative name for that then I'd appreciate it because I think my usage is confusing. It's not a useless notion of "conceptual understanding" though, because while being able to have a program complete a task implies having the conceptual understanding necessary for that task, it's possible to have the conceptual understanding but not be able to make a program, if, for instance, it would require greater (within reason) computing resources.
- kobeya 10y ago
  It does sound pretty useless because the same logic can be used to prove that we have a conceptual understanding of general intelligence, because after all we exist and we think.
lern_too_spel 10y ago
Google Translate never used conceptual modeling. The original Google Translate used statistical machine translation.
- btilly 10y ago
  Google Translate itself may have been done through statistical machine translation, but that wasn't Google's first attempt at the subject. In particular Google spent around $100 million in 2003 for Applied Semantics, in part hoping that their natural language processing expertise could be used for translation. That technology was superseded by statistical techniques.

by kobeya 10y ago

adrusi 10y ago

In context, that claim was an explanation of what I was trying to get at with the phrase "conceptual understanding". We don't have a conceptual understanding of language. We do have a conceptual understanding of how to translate between human languages — Proof: we can translate between human languages. If you think that's not adequate proof then you're disagreeing with me on the semantics of "conceptual understanding". If you have an alternative name for that then I'd appreciate it because I think my usage is confusing. It's not a useless notion of "conceptual understanding" though, because while being able to have a program complete a task implies having the conceptual understanding necessary for that task, it's possible to have the conceptual understanding but not be able to make a program, if, for instance, it would require greater (within reason) computing resources.

kobeya 10y ago
It does sound pretty useless because the same logic can be used to prove that we have a conceptual understanding of general intelligence, because after all we exist and we think.

lern_too_spel 10y ago

Google Translate never used conceptual modeling. The original Google Translate used statistical machine translation.

btilly 10y ago
Google Translate itself may have been done through statistical machine translation, but that wasn't Google's first attempt at the subject. In particular Google spent around $100 million in 2003 for Applied Semantics, in part hoping that their natural language processing expertise could be used for translation. That technology was superseded by statistical techniques.