My point about child speech is that the kind of utterances produced by GT would not be acceptable as correct speech if they came from a child, let alone an adult. We'd recognise them as imperfect. Coming from GT though they're considered "good".
Two other comments accuse me of letting perfect be the enemy of good. But for this to happen, GT translations must be "good" in the first place. Well, they're not. They are often terrible.
I don't understand why this criticism is even controversial. Terrible won't become good if we don't point out that it is, in fact, terrible.
Plus, I'm very concerned about promoting commercial products as examples of technological and scientific progress. Of course Google has an incentive to claim its translation service is great. Why does anyone else?
> My point about child speech is that the kind of utterances produced by GT would not be acceptable as correct speech if they came from a child, let alone an adult. We'd recognise them as imperfect. Coming from GT though they're considered "good".
Because the standards for automated translation, something that didn't exist a few decades ago, are different from the standards of human speech and translation? No-one is saying Google Translate is on par or anywhere near human translation.
> Terrible won't become good if we don't point out that it is, in fact, terrible.
Yes, but you see complacency where there is none. The engineers who achieved this are rightfully proud about it, but I doubt they think this is the end of the line for automated translation.
It's helpful to say "this is flawed here and there, you can do better!", but your attitude seems needlessly antagonistic. Frankly, it sounds to me as if you feel threatened by this development. You shouldn't. As you point out, this is miles behind actual human translation in subtlety. Human-level understanding of speech (with double meanings, play on words, puns, understatements, etc) may very well be impossible for software to achieve; in fact, I think it's forever out of reach. But that's not the goal of automated translation; it's merely meant to be a useful tool when there are no human translators available.
> Plus, I'm very concerned about promoting commercial products as examples of technological and scientific progress. Of course Google has an incentive to claim its translation service is great. Why does anyone else?
Because they are definitely examples of technological progress and we can feel excited about it, and hope it gets even better! I couldn't care less about the Google brand. I understand your concern and I'm not excited about Google-the-business.
>> No-one is saying Google Translate is on par or anywhere near human translation.
Well, they kind of do. Like I say elsewhere, the common measure of machine
translation performance is a family of metrics like BLEU or ROUGE that basically
compare machine translation to human translation. So when a research team
claims strong performance in machine translation, they're really saying that
their systems can do the kind of translation that humans can do, in a very
literal sense (of similarity between tokens or n-grams). Besides, like
Hofstadter says, Google has often claimed its NLP systems (for example, its NL
Parser, Parser Mc Parseface) approach or outdo human performance.
Google is quite unrealistic in the way it promotes its technology and claiming
it does better than humans is its bread and butter in this regard.
>> Frankly, it sounds to me as if you feel threatened by this development.
I don't have any reason to feel threatened :) I'm a machine learning PhD
researcher with some hands-on experience of NLP (though not machine
translation specifically- I've only theoretical knowledge of it). I have a
background in foreign languages and translation, but not professionally.
If I can summarise my concerns, it's not that I'm worried that machine
translation will become so good it will take the jobs of human translators.
I'm worried that we will keep replacing human workers with bad AI and end up
making our lives a lot worse in the process.
Two other comments accuse me of letting perfect be the enemy of good. But for this to happen, GT translations must be "good" in the first place. Well, they're not. They are often terrible.
I don't understand why this criticism is even controversial. Terrible won't become good if we don't point out that it is, in fact, terrible.
Plus, I'm very concerned about promoting commercial products as examples of technological and scientific progress. Of course Google has an incentive to claim its translation service is great. Why does anyone else?