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> “We had to think outside the box of just understanding English. We had to train Alexa to understand the proper noun in Tamil, Hindi, Telugu, Punjabi, Malayala

> “We had to think outside the box of just understanding English. We had to train Alexa to understand the proper noun in Tamil, Hindi, Telugu, Punjabi, Malayalam, among others,” says Kumar Alexa India's true test will be on how it handles ____glish (where ____ = the base language) that's very common in everyday spoken interactions, esp. in the South. Ex: Tanglish = Tamil + English mixed-in. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanglish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanglish Kanglish = Kannada + English mixed in. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanglish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanglish Even TV programs have this. For instance some of the Tamil Soap operas on youtube have this message at the beginning "Marrakama Bell Symbol-la Press Pannunga, Subscribe Pannunga". = 3 Tamil words, 4 english words. 1 Tamil+English word. Translation. "Don't forget to press bell symbol and subscribe."

onion2k 9y ago
Could Amazon just treat those as new, separate languages with a corpus of words that includes the main language plus English? It'd mean the dictionary is much bigger but that shouldn't make a big difference (as far as I know, which isn't very far...)
- vadimberman 9y ago
  1. It's not the same as the original language plus English. 2. It's not easy to find data for these languages. It's easier to add the modifications, apparently.
- lozenge 9y ago
  Without a corpus, the training will "teach" the computer that an English word will always be followed by another English word.
  - kaybe 9y ago
    I'm not sure this is true anywhere, and it's changing constantly. Here is my favorite sentence from a German ad: 'We' eröffnet einen neuen Store für Men und Women. (A shopping chain called 'we' opens a new shop for men and women.) This is by no means normal everyday language but marketing is full of these things. (Not that all Germans understand it, I remember a TV show going around asking people what they thought the marketing slogans meant - it was hilarious.)
    - TeMPOraL 9y ago
      Hopefully there will be more work done in mixing languages. That's a particular issue for me with Google Now - it will recognize sentences in Polish, or sentences in English, but... that's not how think in my head. Most of the time I do a free-form mix of those two languages, often at the level of an individual sentence. (To be clear: I'm not whining. Speech recognition is getting absurdly good as it is. It's just that being able to mix languages in a free-form way would be... perfection :).)
zaarn 9y ago
Alexa can't even understand proper Bavarian, how can I expect it to understand Bavarian-English?

onion2k 9y ago

Could Amazon just treat those as new, separate languages with a corpus of words that includes the main language plus English? It'd mean the dictionary is much bigger but that shouldn't make a big difference (as far as I know, which isn't very far...)

vadimberman 9y ago
1. It's not the same as the original language plus English. 2. It's not easy to find data for these languages. It's easier to add the modifications, apparently.
lozenge 9y ago
Without a corpus, the training will "teach" the computer that an English word will always be followed by another English word.
- kaybe 9y ago
  I'm not sure this is true anywhere, and it's changing constantly. Here is my favorite sentence from a German ad: 'We' eröffnet einen neuen Store für Men und Women. (A shopping chain called 'we' opens a new shop for men and women.) This is by no means normal everyday language but marketing is full of these things. (Not that all Germans understand it, I remember a TV show going around asking people what they thought the marketing slogans meant - it was hilarious.)
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    Hopefully there will be more work done in mixing languages. That's a particular issue for me with Google Now - it will recognize sentences in Polish, or sentences in English, but... that's not how think in my head. Most of the time I do a free-form mix of those two languages, often at the level of an individual sentence. (To be clear: I'm not whining. Speech recognition is getting absurdly good as it is. It's just that being able to mix languages in a free-form way would be... perfection :).)

zaarn 9y ago

Alexa can't even understand proper Bavarian, how can I expect it to understand Bavarian-English?