HENRY

Bill Softky at El Reg has a chat to Franz Och from google about their automatic language translation:

What is clearly missing from this approach is any form of “understanding”. The machine has no idea that “walk” is an action using “feet,” except when its statistics tell it the text strings “walk” and “feet” sometimes show up together. Nor does it know the subtle differences between “to boycott” and “not to attend.” Och emphasized that the system does not even represent nouns, verbs, modifiers, or any of the grammatical building blocks we think of as language. In fact, he says, “linguists think our structures are weird” – but he demurred on actually describing them. His machine contains only statistical correlations and relationships, no more or less than “what is in the data.” Each word and phrase in the source votes for various phrases in the output, and the final result is a kind of tallying of those myriad votes.

Fascinating stuff, but unfortunately a bit light on the technical details.

Posted on May 15th, 2007 by Simon Greenhill