(by Giovanni Calcerano) A team of Microsoft researchers announced today that they have created the first machine translation system capable of converting articles and news from Chinese to English with the same precision as a human being. Microsoft says it repeatedly checked the system on a sample of about 2000 sentences from various online newspapers, comparing the result with the translation done manually and even hiring bilingual language consultants to further verify the machine's accuracy.
“Getting the same human result in a machine translation task is a dream we've all always had,” said Xuedong Huang, a technician with the Microsoft team in a blog post for the company. "But we weren't hoping to reach him so soon."
"Much of our research has been inspired by the way humans operate," said Tie-Yan Liu, a senior research officer at Microsoft Research Asia in Beijing. Basically, instead of training AI in one way, different methods have been combined to get more effective and faster results. For example, the "dual learning" method, in which the system not only converts Chinese to English, but then backs to Chinese to see if the original text is significantly altered through the process.
"Machine translation is much more complex than pure vocabulary recognition," said Ming Zhou, assistant director of Microsoft Research Asia and head of the natural language processing group that worked on the project. "People can use different words to express exactly the same thing, and you can't necessarily say which is best."
Zhou also said that the techniques used to achieve this historic result will not be limited to automatic translations.
"Research applied to machine translation can be translated to the entire universe of artificial intelligence research," said Zhou. "And it will also allow, in the future, more accurate and natural translations in other languages"
However, the researchers feel that the system has not yet been tested on real-time news, and they also point out that there are still other challenges to be addressed before the technology can be marketed in Microsoft products.
In any case, it is possible to use the beta version of the new translation system on the Microsoft website: https://translator.microsoft.com/neural. The system will show a sentence in simplified Chinese and the translation obtained with the "new" method and with the "classic" method, in order to demonstrate and highlight the improvements obtained.