TechGist05

 I just saw a Facebook discussion on the Google NMT announcements that explores some of the human evaluation issues. And thought I would add one more observation to this charade before I highlight a completely overlooked study that does provide some valuable insight into the possibilities of NMT ( which I actually believe are real and substantial ) even though it is done in a  "small-scale" University setting. Does anybody else think that it is strange, that none of the press and the journalists that are gushing about the "indistinguishable from human translation" quality claimed by Google, did not attempt to run even a single Chinese page through the new super duper GNMT Chinese engine?   Like this post for example where the author seems to have swallowed the Google story, hook, line, and sinker. There are of course 50 more like this. It took me translating just one page to realize that we are really knee deep in bullshit, as I had difficulty getting even a gist ...

Recently I came upon this little tidbit and initially thought how wonderful, (NMT is surely rising!) and decided to take a closer look and read through the research paper . This exercise left me a little uncertain as I now felt doubt, and began to suspect that this is just another example of that never-ending refrain of the MT world, the empty promise. Without a doubt Google had made some real progress, but “Nearly Indistinguishable From Human Translation” and “GNMT reduces translation errors by more than 55%-85% on several major language pairs “. Hmmm, not really, not really at all, was what my pesky brain kept telling me, especially as I saw this announcement coming up again and again through many news channels, probably pushed heavily by the Google marketing infrastructure. Surely the great Google of the original “Don’t Be Evil” ethos would not bullshit us thus. (In their 2004 founders' letter prior to their initial public offering, Larry Page and Sergey Brin explained tha...