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This is one of the arguments against machine translation: one would first need to construct an AGI capable of observing and understanding the living cultural co

This is one of the arguments against machine translation: one would first need to construct an AGI capable of observing and understanding the living cultural context that language is being used in. Without that, researchers are endlessly having to update the training corpus for the ML system to learn by example.

Victerius 5y ago
The day a machine can make a meme is the day we reach the singularity.
- Ancapistani 5y ago
  Welcome, to the World of Tomorrow! https://imgflip.com/ai-meme https://imgflip.com/ai-meme
  - slowmovintarget 5y ago
    It sort of works... https://imgflip.com/i/69gjkt https://imgflip.com/i/69gjkt
mabub24 5y ago
"If a lion could speak, we could not understand (verstehen)[0] him." - Ludwig Wittgenstein, from Philosophical Investigations [0] Ironically, there is disagreement over the best translation of verstehen. Understand and comprehend have some conceptual overlap, but also some distinctions. The general idea is, though, of understanding in a greater, more all encompassing sense that is only possible when someone/something is no longer alien.
- pavlov 5y ago
  We could just agree that "to forestand" is a new word that means the same as German "verstehen", and maybe eventually it actually would.
  - Koshkin 5y ago
    I do not believe this would make sense. The German 'ver-' has nothing in common with the English 'fore-'.
- mwattsun 5y ago
  How would one even attempt to communicate with an octopus? Alien intelligence: the extraordinary minds of octopuses and other cephalopods https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/mar/28/alien-intelligence-the-extraordinary-minds-of-octopuses-and-other-cephalopods https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/mar/28/alien-in...
  - jdmichal 5y ago
    It's OK, Contact prepared me for this. We should use math. Have we tried strobing a 2-3-5-7 sequence at one, and see if it gives us 11? (The above is meant in jest, of course.)
    - kwhitefoot 5y ago
      > (The above is meant in jest, of course.) Sounds like a good idea to me. But of course one needs to be open minded, there are other functions that satisfy the same rules. :-)
  - runnerup 5y ago
    More seriously, I think humans and other mammals generally can learn to share an “animal” language which uses repetition for bidirectional training (animal to human, human to animal). Elements used for prediction include: - Predictable timing, both circadian and in relation to circumstantial events - body language - sound patterns - touch patterns - performative actions with environmental objects It’s not so much a “universal” language, but rather that mammals seem to share some semi-universal ability to train each other in these cues and learn them. They can be used for surprisingly rich inter-species communication and over time both parties move a lot of the inference and signaling to their subconscious, no longer even taking active brain power to decipher intent and meanings. I’ve also done this when I was working very closely with just myself and one other person and neither of us spoke the others language but we had to get the job done for 8-12 hours every day. We established a system of different grunts and cues that we used first for several weeks. Once that was fluid and we could communicate everything that we needed to, we started replacing/connecting the established grunts with our own language words and that’s how we taught eachother the others’ language. At least for the domain of our work. I have no idea if any of these would be possible with cephalopods but I feel like if we had children and baby octopuses raised together they may find reasonably robust ways to communicate intent, feelings, and find the ability to create novel games to play with eachother.
- coldtea 5y ago
  "We would [understand the Lion]. We're flexible and can get into different perspectives, and we have been close to animal living ourselves for hundreds of thousands of years, plus we watch nature and learn about how lions live and what they do. The lion would have difficulty understanding us, as our world is a superset of its world" - coldtea
  - Mawr 5y ago
    Yeah, I think we'd be just fine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nim_Chimpsky https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nim_Chimpsky > Nim's longest "sentence" was the 16-word-long "Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you."
    - josefx 5y ago
      One could argue that this isn't talking to a well adjusted animal living in its native habitat. It is talking to a long term research subject/victim suffering at the hands of "researchers" while trying to teach it a language that is utterly alien to it. Of course knowing how animals communicate in their natural habitat is not useful if you want to ask them deep questions like "what do you think about global warming" or "do you think god exists", to which they probably wouldn't have an answer anyway.
- avisser 5y ago
  > The general idea is, though, of understanding in a greater, more all encompassing sense that is only possible when someone/something is no longer alien. I would put forward "grok" as a translation. Your use of "no longer alien" evokes that word all the more.
  - jamiek88 5y ago
    Funny how a fictional word, ostensibly Martian, can come to have colloquial meaning in English, even to those who haven’t read the book. Shakespeare and Aesop… and Heinlein.
lifthrasiir 5y ago
I believe machine translation will coevolve with human languages. The utility of machine translation is clear even when the translation is a bit off, so people will be forced to use machine translation anyway and subsequently tweak their own language to have a better chance for machine translators to pick up its meaning. This is actually also a valid strategy to use MT today.
- irrational 5y ago
  I say this both as someone with a degree in linguistics and who has worked as a programmer for decades, there is no way that will happen. People are never going to stop using cultural references, shortened forms, double meanings, puns, abbreviations, slang, etc. just to make machine translation work better.
  - lifthrasiir 5y ago
    Of course this is all speculative and I never said intricacies of human languages will disappear, but human is extremely adaptive. Historically there already had been cases where different languages are used for different social contexts, so we can imagine a similar dichitomy between an informal language (not very amenable to MT) and a formal language (amenable to MT).
    - runnerup 5y ago
      I attempt this when communicating with Chinese parts of my business where English may not be spoken at all. I also don’t know any Chinese. I will generally run my English emails through machine translation back and forth multiple times until I find phrasing and word choices which are “bistable” (I get back the original English). I’ll also usually double check specific critical or unstable words using a variety of translation aids (not machine translation) to ensure any (scope-limited) Chinese I write is actually correct. We do have one native Chinese on my side of the team, and every time I’ve had her check the Chinese she says it’s correct for our technical domain. So we really are already at the point where we can communicate across languages with surprisingly low error rates.
andai 5y ago
GPT-3 handles idioms just fine. Here I tested it on "I fell for her." https://files.catbox.moe/lp6oyg.jpeg https://files.catbox.moe/lp6oyg.jpeg
- jchmrt 5y ago
  You're missing the point of the parent comment: GPT-3 can understand this idiom because it was trained on a corpus in which the context for this idiom already existed. If a new idiom would emerge, the system would not necessarily be able to handle it if it can not understand it from the context it was trained on. Therefore, a translating AI needs to be continuously updated.
  - kbelder 5y ago
    Is that any different than a human? They can be pwnded by new idioms.
    - jchmrt 5y ago
      No it isn't of course, but that speaks for the argument that AGI is necessary for human-level translation :)
      - andai 5y ago
        Or just an up-to-date GPT?
    - xyzzyz 5y ago
      Like, for example, “to be pwned”, which I believe is not going to be understood by majority of English speakers.
      - mcguire 5y ago
        And even fewer ML proggies.
jdmichal 5y ago
It's not really a great argument. Languages are always evolving, so there's always a need to update the system by ingesting new inputs. Even natural general intelligences, aka us humans, learn by repeatedly ingesting the new inputs and perhaps supplementary data, like an explanation from a friend or maybe urbandictionary. EDIT: As an example, how much time is dedicated in schools to explaining turns of phrase and such in Shakespeare. Who at least was writing Modern English. Go back to Chaucer and good luck...
heavenlyblue 5y ago
Machine translation can take the context statistically really well.

Victerius 5y ago

The day a machine can make a meme is the day we reach the singularity.

Ancapistani 5y ago
Welcome, to the World of Tomorrow! https://imgflip.com/ai-meme https://imgflip.com/ai-meme
- slowmovintarget 5y ago
  It sort of works... https://imgflip.com/i/69gjkt https://imgflip.com/i/69gjkt

mabub24 5y ago

"If a lion could speak, we could not understand (verstehen)[0] him." - Ludwig Wittgenstein, from Philosophical Investigations [0] Ironically, there is disagreement over the best translation of verstehen. Understand and comprehend have some conceptual overlap, but also some distinctions. The general idea is, though, of understanding in a greater, more all encompassing sense that is only possible when someone/something is no longer alien.

pavlov 5y ago
We could just agree that "to forestand" is a new word that means the same as German "verstehen", and maybe eventually it actually would.
- Koshkin 5y ago
  I do not believe this would make sense. The German 'ver-' has nothing in common with the English 'fore-'.
mwattsun 5y ago
How would one even attempt to communicate with an octopus? Alien intelligence: the extraordinary minds of octopuses and other cephalopods https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/mar/28/alien-intelligence-the-extraordinary-minds-of-octopuses-and-other-cephalopods https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/mar/28/alien-in...
- jdmichal 5y ago
  It's OK, Contact prepared me for this. We should use math. Have we tried strobing a 2-3-5-7 sequence at one, and see if it gives us 11? (The above is meant in jest, of course.)
  - kwhitefoot 5y ago
    > (The above is meant in jest, of course.) Sounds like a good idea to me. But of course one needs to be open minded, there are other functions that satisfy the same rules. :-)
- runnerup 5y ago
  More seriously, I think humans and other mammals generally can learn to share an “animal” language which uses repetition for bidirectional training (animal to human, human to animal). Elements used for prediction include: - Predictable timing, both circadian and in relation to circumstantial events - body language - sound patterns - touch patterns - performative actions with environmental objects It’s not so much a “universal” language, but rather that mammals seem to share some semi-universal ability to train each other in these cues and learn them. They can be used for surprisingly rich inter-species communication and over time both parties move a lot of the inference and signaling to their subconscious, no longer even taking active brain power to decipher intent and meanings. I’ve also done this when I was working very closely with just myself and one other person and neither of us spoke the others language but we had to get the job done for 8-12 hours every day. We established a system of different grunts and cues that we used first for several weeks. Once that was fluid and we could communicate everything that we needed to, we started replacing/connecting the established grunts with our own language words and that’s how we taught eachother the others’ language. At least for the domain of our work. I have no idea if any of these would be possible with cephalopods but I feel like if we had children and baby octopuses raised together they may find reasonably robust ways to communicate intent, feelings, and find the ability to create novel games to play with eachother.
coldtea 5y ago
"We would [understand the Lion]. We're flexible and can get into different perspectives, and we have been close to animal living ourselves for hundreds of thousands of years, plus we watch nature and learn about how lions live and what they do. The lion would have difficulty understanding us, as our world is a superset of its world" - coldtea
- Mawr 5y ago
  Yeah, I think we'd be just fine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nim_Chimpsky https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nim_Chimpsky > Nim's longest "sentence" was the 16-word-long "Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you."
  - josefx 5y ago
    One could argue that this isn't talking to a well adjusted animal living in its native habitat. It is talking to a long term research subject/victim suffering at the hands of "researchers" while trying to teach it a language that is utterly alien to it. Of course knowing how animals communicate in their natural habitat is not useful if you want to ask them deep questions like "what do you think about global warming" or "do you think god exists", to which they probably wouldn't have an answer anyway.
avisser 5y ago
> The general idea is, though, of understanding in a greater, more all encompassing sense that is only possible when someone/something is no longer alien. I would put forward "grok" as a translation. Your use of "no longer alien" evokes that word all the more.
- jamiek88 5y ago
  Funny how a fictional word, ostensibly Martian, can come to have colloquial meaning in English, even to those who haven’t read the book. Shakespeare and Aesop… and Heinlein.

lifthrasiir 5y ago

I believe machine translation will coevolve with human languages. The utility of machine translation is clear even when the translation is a bit off, so people will be forced to use machine translation anyway and subsequently tweak their own language to have a better chance for machine translators to pick up its meaning. This is actually also a valid strategy to use MT today.

irrational 5y ago
I say this both as someone with a degree in linguistics and who has worked as a programmer for decades, there is no way that will happen. People are never going to stop using cultural references, shortened forms, double meanings, puns, abbreviations, slang, etc. just to make machine translation work better.
- lifthrasiir 5y ago
  Of course this is all speculative and I never said intricacies of human languages will disappear, but human is extremely adaptive. Historically there already had been cases where different languages are used for different social contexts, so we can imagine a similar dichitomy between an informal language (not very amenable to MT) and a formal language (amenable to MT).
  - runnerup 5y ago
    I attempt this when communicating with Chinese parts of my business where English may not be spoken at all. I also don’t know any Chinese. I will generally run my English emails through machine translation back and forth multiple times until I find phrasing and word choices which are “bistable” (I get back the original English). I’ll also usually double check specific critical or unstable words using a variety of translation aids (not machine translation) to ensure any (scope-limited) Chinese I write is actually correct. We do have one native Chinese on my side of the team, and every time I’ve had her check the Chinese she says it’s correct for our technical domain. So we really are already at the point where we can communicate across languages with surprisingly low error rates.

andai 5y ago

GPT-3 handles idioms just fine. Here I tested it on "I fell for her." https://files.catbox.moe/lp6oyg.jpeg https://files.catbox.moe/lp6oyg.jpeg

jchmrt 5y ago
You're missing the point of the parent comment: GPT-3 can understand this idiom because it was trained on a corpus in which the context for this idiom already existed. If a new idiom would emerge, the system would not necessarily be able to handle it if it can not understand it from the context it was trained on. Therefore, a translating AI needs to be continuously updated.
- kbelder 5y ago
  Is that any different than a human? They can be pwnded by new idioms.
  - jchmrt 5y ago
    No it isn't of course, but that speaks for the argument that AGI is necessary for human-level translation :)
    - andai 5y ago
      Or just an up-to-date GPT?
  - xyzzyz 5y ago
    Like, for example, “to be pwned”, which I believe is not going to be understood by majority of English speakers.
    - mcguire 5y ago
      And even fewer ML proggies.

jdmichal 5y ago

It's not really a great argument. Languages are always evolving, so there's always a need to update the system by ingesting new inputs. Even natural general intelligences, aka us humans, learn by repeatedly ingesting the new inputs and perhaps supplementary data, like an explanation from a friend or maybe urbandictionary. EDIT: As an example, how much time is dedicated in schools to explaining turns of phrase and such in Shakespeare. Who at least was writing Modern English. Go back to Chaucer and good luck...

heavenlyblue 5y ago

Machine translation can take the context statistically really well.