Hi-Tech

Microsoft Reaches Human Parity With Chinese to English News Translation

March 16, 2018 11:00·
Microsoft Achieves Breakthrough In Chinese To English Machine Translation

Microsoft Achieves Breakthrough In Chinese To English Machine Translation

Researchers from the company's Asia and United States labs said their system achieved human parity on a commonly-used test set of news stories - called "newstest2017" - that was released at a conference recently, a blog post said late on Wednesday. The said test was released last fall at the WMT17 research conference by a team of academic and industry partners. "The pursuit of removing language barriers to help people communicate better is fantastic".

That's similar to what people might do to make sure that their automated translations were accurate, and it allowed the system to refine and learn from its own mistakes. However, getting a machine translation of a web page or news article still yields messy and unclear results up until now. However, even human translators have slight differences in translating foreign words.

"Much of our research is really inspired by how we humans do things", said Tie-Yan Liu, a principal research manager with Microsoft Research Asia in Beijing. This is a problem that all translation researchers face, including Google who picked an algorithm that performed weaker on the algorithmic evaluation, but stronger on human comparison as evaluation. The methods were said to be based on how humans improve and develop their work by repeatedly doing it over and over until they get it right. It also employs a number of different AI-training methods, including dual learning, deliberation networks and joint training to try to mimic how humans learn.

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With several 2,000 sentence tests run and confirmation from 3rd party bilingual language consultants Microsoft Researchers had enough data to confidently attest to the accuracy of its new machine translation. "We just didn't realise we'd be able to hit it so soon", Huang said.

Microsoft Translator has long played second fiddle to the might of Translate, but is likely to offer a greater degree of accuracy following Microsoft's latest AI breakthrough, and free app Waygo translates Chinese, Japanese and Korean characters by simply pointing your smartphone's camera at menus and signs, and has ambitions to add other languages to its roster.

Ming Zhou, assistant managing director of Microsoft Research Asia, cautioned that there are still many challenges ahead, such as testing the system on real-time news stories.

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