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Machine translation from/to Japanese is astoundingly awful. This has been my barometer for whether the hype around "AI" is real, and I'm always disappointed. It

by TillE 8y ago

Machine translation from/to Japanese is astoundingly awful. This has been my barometer for whether the hype around "AI" is real, and I'm always disappointed. It's a hard problem that's nowhere near to being cracked.

klodolph 8y ago
That is… absolutely true, and yet “I missed my flight” probably should be in the list of canned phrases that can just be looked up in a dictionary, along with “Where is the bathroom” and ”Check, please”.
lqdc13 8y ago
Same with Russian (Yandex does an OK job). But https://www.deepl.com https://www.deepl.com is pretty amazing in my experience for the languages it's available for.
titanix2 8y ago
This become even more awful when the target language is not English because English is used as a pivot language: there is now two rounds of errors. I’ve heard from a researcher specialized in the AT field that a rule based Japanese to French system exists and is quite good but I’ve never seen the system itself.
- tomjakubowski 8y ago
  I wonder, would another language serve better as a "pivot", all else equal (like, let's ignore corpus size)? English is both a wonderfully expressive but also frustrating language because of its vocabulary's flexibility, ambiguity, and adaptability.
  - crooked-v 8y ago
    Esperanto?
  - bsaul 8y ago
    french used to be the language in which international laws and treaties were written because it’s supposed to be one of the most precise. later, german was the language of choice of philosopher because of its rigourous structure and the ability to make new words just by combining them. now it’s english, because it’s the easier to learn. but also the real reason was the economical power of its time impose its language. The reason english was chosen probably is only because the software developers were english. I think slavic language would be the best though, because every single word takes a different variation if they’re about a man or woman, etc. So there’s probably the least amount of ambiguity. But probably an invented intermediate language would be the best. Except the google style translators don’t try to infer any meaning, which makes it hard to reason about.
    - h1d 8y ago
      Funny English sounds like PHP programming language when it's used broadly, relatively easy to understand but sometimes the rules are too loose and some other languages are more strict but not everyone likes the strictness.
    - titanix2 8y ago
      A paper or webpage I read long ago about Bing Translate internals mentionned to use of an intermediate language that was artificial.
  - eipipuz 8y ago
    why have one pivot at all? why can't french be the pivot between spanish and english? if we must have one and you believe in euroversals, then german and/or french might be better than english…
    - titanix2 8y ago
      Resources availability. English/X or X/English pairs probably exist for a lot of X and may be well endowed. But for any other X/Y pairs resources may not exist at all or be too small to use. That being said it is still interesting to develop this kind of ressources (for example dictionaries) because they can be used for other NLP tasks.
jayd16 8y ago
Google translate seems to get the correct phrase so at least there's hope.
- fouc 8y ago
  When you click on the translation in google it gives you the option of 'improve answer' in the drop down. There's a huge amount of fixed phrases because google's translate didn't actually get it right unfortunately.
keithly 8y ago
Reminds me of this article by Douglas Hofstadter: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/01/the-shallowness-of-google-translate/551570/?single_page=true https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/01/the-s...
stochastic_monk 8y ago
I expect that future work which provides concepts in the external world to models will eventually do better. Translation by context rather than content has limits.
pcurve 8y ago
Japanese and Korean languages are pretty hard to translate. In Korean, 나좀 봐주라 literally translates into "Look at me", but in most cases, it means, "cut me some slack". Google translate gets this wrong. If you Google translate "cut me some slack" into either Korean or Japanese, it also fails. But if you translate Japanese phrase "もう勘弁してくれよぉ" into English, it is translated into "Please forgive me already", but in reality, it's more like, "Cut me some slack! Or give me a break!" Translation is hard.
- curiousgal 8y ago
  Even French and German are hard, comparing deeply.org to Google translator shows how awful the latter is.

by TillE 8y ago

klodolph 8y ago

That is… absolutely true, and yet “I missed my flight” probably should be in the list of canned phrases that can just be looked up in a dictionary, along with “Where is the bathroom” and ”Check, please”.

lqdc13 8y ago

Same with Russian (Yandex does an OK job). But https://www.deepl.com https://www.deepl.com is pretty amazing in my experience for the languages it's available for.

titanix2 8y ago

This become even more awful when the target language is not English because English is used as a pivot language: there is now two rounds of errors. I’ve heard from a researcher specialized in the AT field that a rule based Japanese to French system exists and is quite good but I’ve never seen the system itself.

tomjakubowski 8y ago
I wonder, would another language serve better as a "pivot", all else equal (like, let's ignore corpus size)? English is both a wonderfully expressive but also frustrating language because of its vocabulary's flexibility, ambiguity, and adaptability.
- crooked-v 8y ago
  Esperanto?
- bsaul 8y ago
  french used to be the language in which international laws and treaties were written because it’s supposed to be one of the most precise. later, german was the language of choice of philosopher because of its rigourous structure and the ability to make new words just by combining them. now it’s english, because it’s the easier to learn. but also the real reason was the economical power of its time impose its language. The reason english was chosen probably is only because the software developers were english. I think slavic language would be the best though, because every single word takes a different variation if they’re about a man or woman, etc. So there’s probably the least amount of ambiguity. But probably an invented intermediate language would be the best. Except the google style translators don’t try to infer any meaning, which makes it hard to reason about.
  - h1d 8y ago
    Funny English sounds like PHP programming language when it's used broadly, relatively easy to understand but sometimes the rules are too loose and some other languages are more strict but not everyone likes the strictness.
  - titanix2 8y ago
    A paper or webpage I read long ago about Bing Translate internals mentionned to use of an intermediate language that was artificial.
- eipipuz 8y ago
  why have one pivot at all? why can't french be the pivot between spanish and english? if we must have one and you believe in euroversals, then german and/or french might be better than english…
  - titanix2 8y ago
    Resources availability. English/X or X/English pairs probably exist for a lot of X and may be well endowed. But for any other X/Y pairs resources may not exist at all or be too small to use. That being said it is still interesting to develop this kind of ressources (for example dictionaries) because they can be used for other NLP tasks.

jayd16 8y ago

Google translate seems to get the correct phrase so at least there's hope.

fouc 8y ago
When you click on the translation in google it gives you the option of 'improve answer' in the drop down. There's a huge amount of fixed phrases because google's translate didn't actually get it right unfortunately.

keithly 8y ago

Reminds me of this article by Douglas Hofstadter: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/01/the-shallowness-of-google-translate/551570/?single_page=true https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/01/the-s...

stochastic_monk 8y ago

I expect that future work which provides concepts in the external world to models will eventually do better. Translation by context rather than content has limits.

pcurve 8y ago

Japanese and Korean languages are pretty hard to translate. In Korean, 나좀 봐주라 literally translates into "Look at me", but in most cases, it means, "cut me some slack". Google translate gets this wrong. If you Google translate "cut me some slack" into either Korean or Japanese, it also fails. But if you translate Japanese phrase "もう勘弁してくれよぉ" into English, it is translated into "Please forgive me already", but in reality, it's more like, "Cut me some slack! Or give me a break!" Translation is hard.

curiousgal 8y ago
Even French and German are hard, comparing deeply.org to Google translator shows how awful the latter is.