João Graça, co-founder and CTO of Unbabel, on what machine translation can teach us about the challenges still lying ahead for artificial intelligence.
Can you understand this sentence? Now try understanding the long and convoluted and unexpectedly – maybe never-ending, or maybe ending-sooner-than-you-think, but let’s hope it ends soon – nature of this alternative sentence.
The complexities of language can be an inconvenience to a reader. But even to today’s smartest machine learning algorithms, there are more translation challenges remaining than advances in other fields would have you believe.
These challenges in particular are a good demonstration of the multitude of complexities that still remain for machines to catch up with human performance.
You say tomato
When it comes to translation, there are two categories of content. On one hand, you have “commodity” translation. Perhaps you want to point your phone at a menu and get a rough idea of what it is. Or you want to impress a colleague with a phrase from their local language....