Re:Playing Around with Machine Translation
by og_kalu on Friday September 15, 2023 @12:32PM
(#37525645)
>Neural Machine Translation models don't need those either. That's been the case at least since 2016.
Right. But those models still operate on parallel corpora alone.
In LLMs, translation pairs are not the only data improving translations.
>But, hey, hype
It's not hype man. GPT-4 is much better for distant language pairs.
Neural Machine Translation models don't need those either. That's been the case at least since 2016.
That was one of the big claims by Google, that Google Translate had created its own "interlingua" thanks to which it could translate between languages for which it doesn't have parallel corpora:
Following several months of testing, the researchers behind the AI have seen it be able to blindly translate languages even if it's never studied one of the languages involved in the translation. "An example of this would be translations between Korean and Japanese where Korean⇄Japanese examples were not shown to the system," the Mike Schuster, from Google Brain wrote in a blogpost.
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/google-ai-language-create
It was obvious already back then that this "interlingua" was no other than English, e.g., from the same article:
The team said the system was able to make "reasonable" translations of the languages it had not been taught to translate. In one instance, a research paper published alongside the blog, says the AI was taught Portuguese→English and English→Spanish. It was then able to make translations between Portuguese→Spanish.
But, hey, hype.