He had broken his leg and he put blades on him. 
  Basilica, who is a little bit of mascara with him, got something chocolates and flowers. 
  Worst you know who it is? 
  she was Maria, who lost her last year. 
  Destruction!

This is not "good enough" (as opposed to perfect). That's just terribly bad. If you think it works for you that's only because you're so good at understanding language by dint of your being human (well- I assume).

Of course human translators get it badly wrong. I've read human translations that are not much better than that nonsense above, to be honest. But a reasonably competent human translator will never make the kind of elementary mistakes that automatic translation does. And those elementary mistakes will always escalate to the point that the meaning of longer passages will deteriorate to gibberish.

As to being able to understand basic signs, posters and menus in Greek- you can do that with a good travel guide also. And the travel guide will not claim to be a breakthrough Artificial Intelligence system, like Google claims for GT.

When machine translation makes mistakes on the other hand, the translation itself makes no sense. It's not just that its meaning is unconnected to the original; its meaning isn't.

If a system is 99% right, but the remaining 1% is catastrophically bad, it negates a lot of the part that is actually good. You might end up more confused by the machine translation than you were without it.

Machine translations is one of these systems where 99% good simply isn't good enough.

But the article had more subtle examples where important nuances are lost in translation, and those are impossible to pick up unless you speak the original language, but we don't speak the original language, because that was the whole point of using GT to start with, right?

Obviously, GT will get better at reducing the gibberish errors, but that just strengthens the trap, because now you will never think it's making any errors, because you lack the knowledge required to know what errors it makes!

I really, really disagree. If 99% lets me understand the gist of an idea, or instructions for something (of course: where there is no risk of harm), I'd take it -- even with the 1% of hilariously catastrophic mistranslations. This means I can go to Japan or Greece and just use Google Translate and be reasonably confident I can manage with a combination of this tool and my human-level understanding of language :) It's definitely good enough for me.

The very first example in the article was one where GT gets the words mostly right, but completely misses the point.

And if you miss the point, then the original text hasn't been translated. It's merely been decoded, this is the entire point of the article. Calling what GT does "translation" is wrong.

Yes, there's absolutely value in decoding signs and texts and simple phrases and directions. It allows you to go to a foreign country and get around without speaking the native language. Great. But a phrasebook can do the exact same thing, except it doesn't claim breakthrough AI machine-consciousness bla bla bla.

I'm not as good with words as Hofstadter, so here's his words from the end of the article that summarizes the problem quite nicely:

"I’ve recently seen bar graphs made by technophiles that claim to represent the “quality” of translations done by humans and by computers, and these graphs depict the latest translation engines as being within striking distance of human-level translation. To me, however, such quantification of the unquantifiable reeks of pseudoscience, or, if you prefer, of nerds trying to mathematize things whose intangible, subtle, artistic nature eludes them. To my mind, Google Translate’s output today ranges all the way from excellent to grotesque, but I can’t quantify my feelings about it. Think of my first example involving “his” and “her” items. The idealess program got nearly all the words right, but despite that slight success, it totally missed the point. How, in such a case, should one “quantify” the quality of the job? The use of scientific-looking bar graphs to represent translation quality is simply an abuse of the external trappings of science."

> [Google Translate] allows you to go to a foreign country and get around without speaking the native language. Great. But a phrasebook can do the exact same thing, except it doesn't claim breakthrough AI machine-consciousness

Wait, who is talking about consciousness? That's a different deal, and let me assure you I'm as skeptical as you appear to be. AI is a buzzword here, don't let it distract you from the effectiveness of the actual techniques.

Also, it stands to reason portable automated translation like your phone can do is not something a phrasebook can do. I can point to a random sign, take a picture of it and have Google Translate give me a helpful if quirky translation. I definitely cannot pull out a phrasebook and hope something matches what I'm seeing in the sign; it will take ages. So it's at least more convenient.

In fact, I've done this with Japanese instructions to assemble a scale model. Granted, here the problem domain was very constrained, and I already sort of guessed what I was trying to do -- and yet, Google Translate was orders of magnitude more helpful than flipping through a phrasebook. Would it be as helpful if I was in completely uncharted waters, where I can make fewer guesses? Probably not. Still, very impressive.

The particular paragraph is mangled to the point of being gibberish, yes, and noone with the option to choose between your translation or Google's would give Google's even a second glance. But if I don't, it's that, or a paragraph of text that I can just about identify as being Greek, but which is otherwise, well, Greek to me. But as you concede, with context and human understanding of language, I was able to pick out a few crucial chunks of meaning.

Whether it's good enough depends on what I'm trying to achieve. If I'm judging your skill as a writer and storyteller, then obviously not. But if we hung out with Vasiliki, Mitsos and Maria last year and you put that on Facebook, I'd at least know enough to send my sympathy to Mitsos and have a good chuckle over Vasiliki's romantic endeavours, which would probably be what you intended - - which is pretty much the definition of "good enough".

As for travel guides and Google Translate, as someone who's travelled extensively both pre and post Google Translate, there is nothing in the difference of experience that doesn't qualify as a breakthrough. I have had fully meaningful (if not exactly deeply philosophical) conversations with people entirely mediated by Google Translate. I'm sorry your experiences have been so different from mine.

You just discovered the poor quality of LSTM generated text. It might come as a surprise to you, but it's legend between AI researchers :-(

If it's not translation (such as in chatbots, image captioning, or computer generated text in general), it's even worse. Unfortunately we can't generate text that makes sense. We can only do it in very specific cases and with lots of errors. Other language models are even worse than LSTMs.

The problem is that automated translators don't have real world experience and can't think causally. Humans can, because we are in possession of a body and live inside a complex world. We can experiment to test our hypothesis, GT only sees text and can't test anything.

I actually disagree it's gibberish. I could understand enough to make sense of the situation (the part about blades in his leg puzzled me, but I understood about Maria being an ex girlfriend even if the sentence didn't resemble actual human language). This translation is by definition not gibberish.

> But if we hung out with Vasiliki, Mitsos and Maria last year and you put that on Facebook, I'd at least know enough to send my sympathy to Mitsos and have a good chuckle over Vasiliki's romantic endeavours, which would probably be what you intended - - which is pretty much the definition of "good enough".

Exactly!

You have a definition of gibberish? ~.^

If I can extract a reasonably accurate understanding from a paragraph, then by definition it's not meaningless nor unintelligible.

What I mean by that is that all the language structures we choose to convey a certain meaning are arbitrary and, by themselves, completely meaningless. We assign meaning to them by convention (and the fact that this convention keeps changing is why we have different languages and why even the "same" language sounds very different a few years down the line). It is when this convention is breached that our ability to understand the intended meaning is compromised.

I'd liken this to adding noise to a signal. The more a passage of text deviates from the conventional structures for the intended meaning, the less the information that can be safely extracted from it. The more the noise, the less likely that 100% of people hearing or reading the utterance will understand 100% of its indended meaning.

So in other words- it's still gibberirsh even if you can understand it. Because maybe you personally can understand it, but any number of other people will not- people with different language abilities, that is.

To draw an analogy- maybe you personally don't need a vaccine for chicken pox because you are immune to it. That doesn't make the vaccine unnecessary. Others don't have your immunity. etc.

No, I disagree with this premise. It is contrary to the definition of gibberish I'm using (and which I linked to). Since we disagree on this fundamental issue, the rest of this conversation is very difficult.

If all language is gibberish, like you say, then it's ok for Google Translate to produce gibberish. (Sorry, that doesn't make sense to me!)

So language utterances mean nothing by themselves. They only have the meaning we assign to them by convention. It is in this sense that I say that those utterances are gibberish.

This might sound weird to you, but if you think about it, most natural language processing tasks basically come down to performing a search for the meaning that is related to a given structure. What makes this search very difficult is that structures are inherently meaningless, so there's no logical reason why a given string might mean something particular. Essentially, we try to teach the NLP system to learn our conventions. But that is very hard to do, because we don't exactly understand how these conventions work, ourselves.

So it's not OK for GT to produce random gibberish- because there is only one set of strings of gibberish that is associated with the intended meaning of a sentence in an original language.

And, I guess that's my point. If GT's search fails to find the right string then it's not doing very well.

> So it's not OK for GT to produce random gibberish

Thankfully, it doesn't in most cases. If it were random, we wouldn't be able to understand it (please, don't ask anything that starts with "how do you know...?". I know. Let's drop that angle, please!) The chance of all of us understanding roughly the same idea from random gibberish is effectively zero. Hence, it's not random gibberish.

So this is something to wonder about: why is it that we all speak in a certain way? If we can understand language with unfamiliar structure, why does language follow set patterns? Why don't we all speak any old way we like?

Mind you, I'm not saying I have any answer to this. Because it's actually a major question. You could, for example, observe that people will often break from accepted conventions when speaking or writing and it's hard to even measure the deviation from accepted conventions "in the wild" (as opposed to more formal text or speech). And yet there does seem to be a set of patterns of utterances that we observe when speaking or writing in our respective languages. There are rules, in language, and these rules are observed. Why is that?

Understanding the answer to this question -what makes language, language, rather than random noise- could tremendously boost NLP tasks of all sorts. To be honest, I don't see anyone asking it though. Instead people have become comfortable with the paradox of the random noise (sorry, I insist) generated by computer programs, and treat it as an engineering problem to be solved, rather than an opportunity to understand human language by looking at its difference to machine language (if I may).

>> (please, don't ask anything that starts with "how do you know...?". I know. Let's drop that angle, please!)

I understand if you don't want to spend time discussing this, but I hope you understand that, unless you justify your thinking, you can't expect anyone else to agree with it.

In any case, "how do you know" is the fundamental question you have to ask if you want to advance your knowledge. That's how it all begins- by challengine assumptions (yours or others').

Not everyone will understand your hand-made translation, either. Human understanding works by consensus. Someone will be left out of this consensus almost always. It doesn't mean the automated translation is gibberish. If enough people understand the automated translation, then by definition it's not gibberish, because random noise doesn't carry enough information for you to get the idea about Maria, Vassiliki, the hospital or the broken leg.

> I understand if you don't want to spend time discussing this, but I hope you understand that, unless you justify your thinking, you can't expect anyone else to agree with it.

I have justified it. I asked you to drop it because we're running in circles, not because I don't have arguments. Your argument seems solipsistic to me: "but how do you know?" -- I know because it's my experience and because other people agree with me. How do you know your translation is good, anyway? Because it's what you think and because other people agreed with you. Because you managed to successfully -- as assessed by yourself -- communicate the idea you wanted.

To go back to an earlier example of learning to solve mathematical problems with machine learning- let's call it machine arithmetic. Say we developed a machine arithmetic system that consistently estimated the sum of 4 + 4 to be 7. That's consistently close to the correct answer, but it's also consistently not the correct answer.

So, to pose yet another question: a system trained to solve maths problems who got it almost right 100% of the time, would be considered pretty rubbish. Why is GT not? It's computing language, not maths, but its computation is still very often completely wrong in specific, measurable ways that really leave no room for subjective interpretation.

What matters for the purpose of human communication is the latter, not the former. Success at communication trumps your grammatical errors (where beauty is not concerned, of course. If you're going to argue automated translation produces ugly results, then you'll hear no argument from me!).

> Not trying to be offensive, but your definition of gibberish is subjective

You're not offensive; you're arbitrary. I provided you with a dictionary definition of gibberish, while your definition seems to be suspiciously ad hoc. You've essentially defined gibberish as "whatever output automated translation currently produces", which makes this debate pointless.

Math and natural language are different. Again, the standards are different, just as in your example with child's language. No, we do not judge a computer's ability to "translate" the same as we judge a young kid's ability to speak. There's nothing surprising about these two standards being different.

Your example with Math is not particularly relevant. However, since your background seems not to be computer science [1], maybe you're unfamiliar with heuristics: in the context of computer science, a heuristic is a technique where you take an optimization problem (e.g. "finding the minimum of something", "the shortest route to somewhere", etc) which is computationally untractable and provide a "good enough" answer which can be computed. The definition of what is "good enough" is, of course, relevant to the application of a particular heuristic in a specific context. In this sense, for some heuristic and its application, maybe 7 is a "good enough" answer even though the right answer is 8.

[1] This was written before I read in another reply of yours that you claim to be working on a PhD in Machine Learning. Fair enough! But even if you're familiar with heuristics, I think my point stands.

But grammatical errors cause communication to fail. Because they introduce (measurable) noise to the signal, which obviously makes it harder to extract information from it.

Btw, grammaticality is another uncontroversial measure of the performance of NLP systems that are required to generate language (like machine translation does). There is some theory behind the idea that well-formed sentences are inherently more intelligible, that will take a lot more to overturn than "it works for me".

To draw yet another analogy- homeopathy "works" for some people: they feel better when they take its concoctions. That doesn't make homeopathy objectively useful.

>> in the context of computer science, a heuristic is a technique where you take an optimization problem (e.g. "finding the minimum of something", "the shortest route to somewhere", etc) which is computationally untractable and provide a "good enough" answer which can be computed.

Yes, looking at machine translation as a heuristic is a good point. Like I say in other comments, the problem of machine translation has no good definition. That's because it's very difficult to define what is a "good translation" in a formal and principled manner. Hence, we're left with heuristics like "how close this automatic translation is to this human translation" (where the human translation is whatever happens to be available, rather than something chosen for its quality or other attributes).

This is actually exactly what machine translation systems do. They are made to optimise a measure of error over examples of human translation. So GT is actually designed to do what you say is not important, produce grammatically and syntactically correct language, like its examples are.

In that, it fails. It may achieve your goal of "communication" but that is not really a heuristic, it's more of a quality that you, personally (and obviously other people too) assign some value to. But it's far from a universally accepted measure of machine translation quality. You might say that "communication" is a business goal whereas matching human translations is an engineering goal.

As a P.S., I'm not "claiming" to be working on a PhD. The information is in my profile with links to my linkedin and github :)

But when communication doesn't fail, grammatical errors don't matter that much. Because communication success is its own evidence (cue your "but how do you know [...]?" -- please don't. We've been down that road and your argument is unconvincing and solipsistic).

You say grammar correctness is another uncontroversial measure of NLP, but nobody was arguing against this. Of course it is. You're shifting the goalpost. Grammar matters. You can tell when something is ungrammatical but whether this affects communication is another issue. It's also a matter of degree: something can be so ungrammatical it conveys no meaning; and something can be ungrammatical enough to sound "bad", but still convey its intended meaning.

> Hence, we're left with heuristics like "how close this automatic translation is to this human translation"

That's one heuristic, sure, and a pretty good one! Not the only one, though. In any case, you missed the point that your Math example was not very good, because it ignored that in a heuristic, what you proposed as a bad "translation" could actually be a good one. In the realm of human language translations, it's never a case of 4+4=8.

> As a P.S., I'm not "claiming" to be working on a PhD. The information is in my profile with links to my linkedin and github :)

My mistake then! No offense intended.

PS: one more thing: I've looked at your comments history and I actually agree with your skepticism about AI. I think it's overhyped, especially by people with no background and no formal understanding about it -- like Eliezer, who you rightfully mock in your profile, and many other Prophets of the AI Apocalypse (or AI Utopia, depending on their mindset). So consider me a skeptic as well. We're more in agreement that it seems! I just don't think the kind of translation we're talking about is anywhere close to General AI or "understanding" of any form, and I can get excited about a "limited breakthrough" even though it's not actually about AI :)

>> No offense intended.

... and no offense taken, absolutely.

We'll probably get the chance to argue again in the future, anyway, given that you're interested in the same subjects as I am :)

Gibberish means nonsense. If most people understand you, it's not nonsense.

Any conversation can easily become "philosophical" when Google Translate messes up and inserts random garbage instead of intended meaning, and people, instead of dismissing translation as garbage, decide to seek some deeper meaning in it :)

I think you're understating the quality of the automated translation here. It's by definition not nonsense if I can derive a pretty accurate picture of the situation by reading it. While flawed, it's not random gibberish. If it were random, I -- not knowing how to read Greek -- wouldn't be able to understand about someone being in the hospital because of a broken leg, about some friends visiting him, and about the social faux pas of the two girls being in the same room as the patient. Yes, some of the mistranslations are funny, but they are not nonsense.

If an automated translation is good enough for a human-level understanding of language to parse and derive a decently accurate picture out of it, while not understanding a single word of the original text, then that's an impressive achievement!

By the way, those of us who remember the initial results of early Google Translate should be impressed. It was truly, really unusable. It has gone a really long way, to the point I consider using it in places where I really cannot understand a single word or read the script... like in Japan, for example.

Is a machine that produces gibberish that's not too mangled to understand better than having no translation at all? It certainly is. However, Google's hype machine will not stop there- they consistently overstate the ability of their systems, by a very large margin.

If Google was saying "look, we have a machine translation system, it's a bit shit but it gets the job done" that'd be fine. But they don't say that. They pretend their system actually solves machine translation, for real, like AlphaZero solved Go. You just have to watch the triumphant press releases that come out of Google.

For instance:

https://research.googleblog.com/2016/11/zero-shot-translatio...

The post you linked to makes no such claim. The strongest claim to, well, anything, is that it produces "reasonable" translations between language pairs it has never seen.

This inspired us to ask the following question: Can we translate between a language pair which the system has never seen before? An example of this would be translations between Korean and Japanese where Korean⇄Japanese examples were not shown to the system. Impressively, the answer is yes — it can generate reasonable Korean⇄Japanese translations, even though it has never been taught to do so. We call this “zero-shot” translation, shown by the yellow dotted lines in the animation. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time this type of transfer learning has worked in Machine Translation.

Because what they claim to do is really out there- it is something that not even humans can do. If they could actually do it then they would have solved machine translation for real.

And they haven't - like I say above, they seem to have misinterpreted a model of English-to-many (other languages) as an interlingua. And it's not even a very good model of English-to-many.

So the difference between hype and reality is astronomic and I feel very well justified to say what I say.

It's not gibberish. It's just very bad quality. But it helps me extract the meaning, which is not that far from what I do with some of the emails I receive in my day job -- trust me!

To take this a step further- if your child was speaking in such a manner you would be very, very concerned. But with GT it's OK? Why?

Google Translate is supremely useful in the absence of a better alternative. Nobody is contesting that human translation is better than Google Translate, but a human translator isn't always available. Google Translate is better than nothing at all.

A child's first many, many attempts at language are absolute gibberish, then slowly individual words, then combinations of words, then gradually more complex sentences etc -- gradually over several years. When you child first says "mama", the common response is excitement, not berating the child and anyone excited that "mama" isn't Wordsworth, and asking if just saying "mama" is acceptable, why aren't we all just communicating using single words all the time?

A child being able to express itself at all using language is better than it not being able to, and cause for celebration, and so too it is with Google Translate.

I think we're talking at cross-purposes here a bit. I don't really care whether GT is useful as a tool. I care about whether the translations it offers are good translations or not. I think you're basically saying that, if it's good enough for you, then it's a good translation. However, this is not a good measure of the quality of a translation! To begin with, what's good for you is a sujective measure. Further, we wouldn't accept "it's good enough for me" for any other translation than a machine translation- and it's accepted for GT only because we understand the limitations of machine translation systems.

So basically my pointing out the limitations of machine translation systems has nothing to do with whether it's useful to you. It's an attempt to explain why the results of machine translation are objectively bad.

I'll agree if you want that it's very difficult to get to such an objective measure of goodness or badness. But that's actually a reason why it's so hard to do machine translation properly: because it's next to impossible to evaluate machine translation objectively, which in turn makes for a very poorly defined task.

So you can feel justified to say that GT is OK for you, because you can understand it. Others can say that it sucks because they can't. And Google can say it's a breakthrough in AI because it scores high on their formal tests, evaluating using BLEU score (or something equally arbitrary).

But none of those tells us how good or bad GT translation really is. So we're left with what Hofstadter does (and what I did here): eyballing it. And, eyballing it, you can see that it's making elementary, egregious mistakes that are not justified by the hype surrounding GT as a product.

Btw, we can expect a child to get better at using language because most children do. So far, no machine translation system has got a lot better than GT- and I don't even agree that GT has gotten any better over the years, or that it's even any better than earlier systems. It just happens to be Google's system and they advertise it as the best ever- but they can't actually, you know, prove this.

Because if, past a certain age, my child keeps talking this way, it's a sign of development problems. Google Translate is an algorithm and I don't worry about its mental health. The standards for software/machines and human children are different and I find nothing surprising about this fact.

I don't think anyone is claiming Google Translate "is OK" in the sense of "we're done here, we've done all we could, let's stop thinking about automated translation and declare it mission accomplished".

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?

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.

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.