4 ms·

i would say that's more a function of corpus than ML plus is it really that much better? i still get weirdness out of google translate

• PeterisP 6y ago
  Nope, we have loads of experimental evidence (and I mean, it's something one can verify at home for smaller datasets, it does not take that much compute) that neural MT gets significantly better results than what we could (and still can) achieve with "pre-neural" SMT methods on the exact same corpus. A general benchmark for comparing the effectiveness of different MT approaches are the WMT conference series (e.g. http://www.statmt.org/wmt20 http://www.statmt.org/wmt20) shared tasks where the systems are trained on the same corpus. They're still not perfect, and sure, you get weirdness, but it has become significantly better according to all metrics including human comparisons of different translation aspects, which are expensive/rare to do but have been done quite a few times; there's a clear consensus that deep learning "works" for ML. There are certain niches where other methods may still be better (IIRC languages with very little data, and translation of specific 'controlled language' domains), but for mainstream MT I think that nowadays nobody would decide to build a non-neural system.