Google Translate reaches near human accuracy translating Spanish to English after switching to new artificial intelligence technique

Briefing

Google Translate reaches near human accuracy translating Spanish to English after switching to new artificial intelligence technique

September 28, 2016

Briefing

  • Near Human Translation Accuracy – Google Translate's new artificial intelligence algorithm scored 5.2 out of 6 in translating Spanish to English in company experiments, nearing human translation accuracy with score of 5.4
  • New AI Technique – Switched to new artificial intelligence method, called Google Neural Machine Translation (GNMT), which translates entire sentences to get meaning versus previous algorithm based on Phrase-Based Machine Translation (PBMT) that does word-for-word or phrase-by-phrase translation
  • Experiment Methodology – Humans rated how well Google's old PBMT and new GNMT algorithms and human translators performed in translating Wikipedia and news articles with score of 6 given for perfect translation
  • Decreased Error Rate – Reduced errors by more than 60% compared to previous algorithm
  • Languages Included – Plans initial release of new algorithm in Mandarin and will scale to include other languages in future

Accelerator

Sector

Information Technology

Organization

Google Inc.

Source

Original Publication Date

September 27, 2016

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