Google Neural Machine Translation

Google Neural Machine Translation (GNMT) is a neural machine translation (NMT) system developed by Google and introduced in November 2016, that uses an artificial neural network to increase fluency and accuracy in Google Translate.[1][2][3]

GNMT improves on the quality of translation by applying an example based (EBMT) machine translation method in which the system "learns from millions of examples".[2] GNMT's proposed architecture of system learning was first tested on over a hundred languages supported by Google Translate.[2] With the large end-to-end framework, the system learns over time to create better, more natural translations.[1] GNMT is capable of translating whole sentences at a time, rather than just piece by piece.[1] The GNMT network can undertake interlingual machine translation by encoding the semantics of the sentence, rather than by memorizing phrase-to-phrase translations.[2][4]

History

The Google Brain project was established in 2011 in the "secretive Google X research lab"[5] by Google Fellow Jeff Dean, Google Researcher Greg Corrado, and Stanford University Computer Science professor Andrew Ng.[6][7][8] Ng’s work has led to some of the biggest breakthroughs at Google and Stanford.[5]

In September 2016, a research team at Google announced the development of the Google Neural Machine Translation system (GNMT) and by November Google Translate began using neural machine translation (NMT) in preference to its previous statistical methods (SMT)[1][9][10][11] which had been used since October 2007, with its proprietary, in-house SMT technology.[12][13]

Google Translate's NMT system uses a large artificial neural network capable of deep learning.[1][2][3] By using millions of examples, GNMT improves the quality of translation,[2] using broader context to deduce the most relevant translation. The result is then rearranged and adapted to approach grammatically based human language.[1] GNMT's proposed architecture of system learning was first tested on over a hundred languages supported by Google Translate.[2] GNMT did not create its own universal interlingua but rather aimed at commonality found in between many languages, considered to be of more interest to psychologists and linguists than to computer scientists.[14] The new translation engine was first enabled for eight languages: to and from English and French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Turkish in 2016.[15] In March 2017, three additional languages were enabled: Russian, Hindi and Vietnamese along with Thai for which support was added later.[16][17] Support for Hebrew and Arabic was also added with help from the Google Translate Community in the same month.[18] In mid April 2017 Google Netherlands announced support for Dutch and other European languages related to English.[19] Further support was added for nine Indian languages, viz. Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Gujarati, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam and Kannada at the end of April 2017.[20]

Languages Supported by GNMT

This is a list of language translation pairs supported by Google Translate's Neural Machine Translation (NMT) model. As of July 2017 all languages currently only support translation to and from English:[21]

Language Pair Language Codes
1 Afrikaans <-> English af <-> en
2 Arabic <-> English ar <-> en
3 Bulgarian <-> English bg <-> en
4 Chinese (Simplified) <-> English zh-CN  <-> en
5 Chinese (Traditional) <-> English zh-TW <-> en
6 Croatian <-> English hr <-> en
7 Czech <-> English cs <-> en
8 Danish <-> English da <-> en
9 Dutch <-> English nl <-> en
10 French <-> English fr <-> en
11 German <-> English de <-> en
12 Greek <-> English el <-> en
13 Hebrew <-> English iw <-> en
14 Hindi <-> English hi <-> en
15 Icelandic <-> English is <-> en
16 Indonesian <-> English id <-> en
17 Italian <-> English it <-> en
18 Japanese <-> English ja <-> en
19 Korean <-> English ko <-> en
20 Norwegian <-> English no <-> en
21 Polish <-> English pl <-> en
22 Portuguese <-> English pt <-> en
23 Romanian <-> English ro <-> en
24 Russian <-> English ru <-> en
25 Slovak <-> English sk <-> en
26 Spanish <-> English es <-> en
27 Swedish <-> English sv <-> en
28 Thai <-> English th <-> en
29 Turkish <-> English tr <-> en
30 Vietnamese <-> English vi <-> en

Zero-shot translation

The GNMT system is said to represent an improvement over the former Google Translate in that it can handle "zero-shot translation", that is it directly translates one language and into another (for example, Japanese to Korean).[2] Google Translate previously first translated the source language into English and then translated the English into the target language rather than translating directly from one language to another.[4]

See also

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Barak Turovsky (November 15, 2016), "Found in translation: More accurate, fluent sentences in Google Translate", Google Blog, retrieved January 11, 2017
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Mike Schuster, Melvin Johnson, and Nikhil Thorat (November 22, 2016), "Zero-Shot Translation with Google’s Multilingual Neural Machine Translation System", Google Research Blog, retrieved January 11, 2017
  3. 1 2 Gil Fewster (January 5, 2017), "The mind-blowing AI announcement from Google that you probably missed", freeCodeCamp, retrieved January 11, 2017
  4. 1 2 Boitet, Christian; Blanchon, Hervé; Seligman, Mark; Bellynck, Valérie (2010). "MT on and for the Web" (PDF). Retrieved December 1, 2016.
  5. 1 2 Robert D. Hof (August 14, 2014). "A Chinese Internet Giant Starts to Dream: Baidu is a fixture of online life in China, but it wants to become a global power. Can one of the world’s leading artificial intelligence researchers help it challenge Silicon Valley’s biggest companies?". Technology Review. Retrieved January 11, 2017.
  6. ↑ Jeff Dean and Andrew Ng (26 June 2012). "Using large-scale brain simulations for machine learning and A.I.". Official Google Blog. Retrieved 26 January 2015.
  7. ↑ "Google's Large Scale Deep Neural Networks Project". Retrieved 25 October 2015.
  8. ↑ Markoff, John (June 25, 2012). "How Many Computers to Identify a Cat? 16,000". New York Times. Retrieved February 11, 2014.
  9. ↑ Katyanna Quach (November 17, 2016), Google's neural network learns to translate languages it hasn't been trained on: First time machine translation has used true transfer learning, retrieved January 11, 2017
  10. ↑ Lewis-Kraus, Gideon (December 14, 2016). "The Great A.I. Awakening". The New York Times. Retrieved January 11, 2017.
  11. ↑ Le, Quoc; Schuster, Mike (September 27, 2016). "A Neural Network for Machine Translation, at Production Scale". Google Research Blog. Google. Retrieved December 1, 2016.
  12. ↑ Google Switches to its Own Translation System, October 22, 2007
  13. ↑ Barry Schwartz (October 23, 2007). "Google Translate Drops SYSTRAN for Home-Brewed Translation". Search Engine Land.
  14. ↑ Chris McDonald (January 7, 2017), Commenting on Gil Fewster's January 5th article in the Atlantic, retrieved January 11, 2017
  15. ↑ Turovsky, Barak (November 15, 2016). "Found in translation: More accurate, fluent sentences in Google Translate". The Keyword Google Blog. Google. Retrieved December 1, 2016.
  16. ↑ Perez, Sarah (March 6, 2017). "Google’s smarter, A.I.-powered translation system expands to more languages". TechCrunch. Oath Inc.
  17. ↑ Turovsky, Barak. "Higher quality neural translations for a bunch more languages". The Keyword Google Blog. Google. Retrieved 6 March 2017.
  18. ↑ Novet, Jordan (30 March 2017). "Google now provides AI-powered translations for Arabic and Hebrew". VentureBeat.
  19. ↑ Finge, Rachid (19 April 2017). "Grote verbetering voor het Nederlands in Google Translate" [Big improvement for Dutch in Google Translate]. Google Netherlands Blog (in Dutch).
  20. ↑ Turovsky, Barak (April 25, 2017). "Making the internet more inclusive in India". The Keyword.
  21. ↑ "Translation API Language Support". Google Cloud Platform. May 4, 2017.
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