Morgan BellComputers learn languages intelligently
April 28th 2006 08:36
Babel Fish, the internet's oldest, most popular free online translation service has recently been given a new home at Yahoo!.
The service, which was developed in 1997 by Alta Vista (now owned by Yahoo!), translates text or webpages across 38 language pairs, including English, Spanish, Korean, Dutch, French, Portuguese, Russian, German and Greek. Since being ported to its Yahoo! address, Babel Fish has been modified to include simplified and traditional Chinese, a function that allows users to translate search engine queries and of course tighter integration with existing Yahoo! services.
The New Scientist (subscription required) foresees an explosion in translation technologies in the next couple of years, predicting that "ultimately, we may even see an electronic version of the fictional Babel Fish - the universal translator in Douglas Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - in the form of a device like a hearing aid that whispers a translation in your ear as someone speaks to you in another language."
Traditional translation programs are based on grammatical rules, leading to confusion when dealing with bad grammar (common on the internet and everyday speech) and exceptions to the rules. In a famous example quoted by the New Scientist article, an Arabic sentence meaning "The White House confirmed the existence of a new Bin Laden tape," produced "Alpine white new presence tape registered for coffee confirms Laden" when entered into a standard online translator.
Current research is now looking into building software that learns languages for itself. Such software will learn by example , identifying words by their positions within a sentence and using word groupings (such as "juicy" and "fruit") to deduce the meanings of a word - much like how a human leans language.
The possibilities for such a translator are astounding. A program, given sufficient processing power, will be able to learn a language much faster than a human can. In fact, researchers are currently using translation technologies to decipher dolphin whistles and whale noises, and ancient text of unknown languages.
Is this the first step towards artificial intelligence?
(image from randomwire.com)
The service, which was developed in 1997 by Alta Vista (now owned by Yahoo!), translates text or webpages across 38 language pairs, including English, Spanish, Korean, Dutch, French, Portuguese, Russian, German and Greek. Since being ported to its Yahoo! address, Babel Fish has been modified to include simplified and traditional Chinese, a function that allows users to translate search engine queries and of course tighter integration with existing Yahoo! services.
The New Scientist (subscription required) foresees an explosion in translation technologies in the next couple of years, predicting that "ultimately, we may even see an electronic version of the fictional Babel Fish - the universal translator in Douglas Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - in the form of a device like a hearing aid that whispers a translation in your ear as someone speaks to you in another language."
Douglas Adams' Babel Fish
Traditional translation programs are based on grammatical rules, leading to confusion when dealing with bad grammar (common on the internet and everyday speech) and exceptions to the rules. In a famous example quoted by the New Scientist article, an Arabic sentence meaning "The White House confirmed the existence of a new Bin Laden tape," produced "Alpine white new presence tape registered for coffee confirms Laden" when entered into a standard online translator.
Current research is now looking into building software that learns languages for itself. Such software will learn by example , identifying words by their positions within a sentence and using word groupings (such as "juicy" and "fruit") to deduce the meanings of a word - much like how a human leans language.
The possibilities for such a translator are astounding. A program, given sufficient processing power, will be able to learn a language much faster than a human can. In fact, researchers are currently using translation technologies to decipher dolphin whistles and whale noises, and ancient text of unknown languages.
Is this the first step towards artificial intelligence?
(image from randomwire.com)
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