DARPA Starts Ultimate Language Translation Project

An anonymous reader writes "Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has launched the ultimate speech translation engine project that would be capable of real-time interpretation of television and radio programs as well as printed or online textual information in order to be summarized, abstracted, and presented to human analysts emphasizing points of particular interest." If combined with the tower of babel project we discussed earlier, it could only lead to awesomeness.

Awesome? WTF??

[BadAnalogyGuy]

If you consider that now the government will be able to spy on you in your native language to be awesome, then I suppose giving the Feds this sort of technology can only lead to awesomeness.

Surveillance of civilian populations under the guise of "monitoring terrorists" is not something that I'd consider awesome. Irksome, yes. But not awesome.

Humans???

[Anonymous Coward]

What's wrong with using humans? This is exactly what humans are good at. While there most certainly are fields where machines can replace humans, this is _not_ one of them.

http://lyricslist.com/lyrics/artist_albums/16/ac-d c.php/ [lyricslist.com]

Interesting,

[DragonWriter]

Seems likely to be very useful for specifically what they suggest it is for (flagging potentially interesting material for further review by human analysts, a kind of time-saving filtering device for the limited pool of translators available.)

But beyond that, I wouldn't give too much faith in any kind of mechanical translation as particularly reliable on its own except on narrow kinds of material. It conceivably might work for strictly literal usages, or for fairly stable idiomatic uses, but unless you have frequent collection and incorporation of usage data from every culture and subculture that may be a source of translated material, its going to fail, sometimes subtly and sometimes spectacularly, for a lot of idiom. Similarly, even within the same language, different groups using it will have different idiomatic uses that sometimes will produce different or opposing meanings for similar usages, which will require accurate identification of the source at more than just the language level to get correct results from. There's a lot of evolving cultural context that informs the use of language...

Lots of reasons

[phorm]

To properly translate all the nuances of some languages actually requires a lot of skill, and sometimes translating can be ask much interpreting as anything. Granted, this is something a human could handle better than a machine, but the problem is that humans also have a bias. Yes, there have been cases wherein human translation has caused problems because of bias or even due to being outright wrong.

I reminds me of the old joke:

Guard: Now tell me where you hid the money, or you will suffer
Translator: Tell him where the money is, or you will suffer
Prisoner: I'll never speak
Translator: He says he won't tell you
Guard: *putting gun to prisoner's head* Tell him I will blow his brains out if he doesn't tell me immediately
Translator: He will shoot you in the head unless you tell him now
Prisoner: I buried a million dollars under the floorboards in the old woodshed
Translator: *pauses* He says you don't have the guts to shoot him...

Seriously though, I just don't believe it.

[Anonymous Coward]

The US department of Defense is openly claiming to be able to solve one of the world's hardest AI problems, and you don't believe it? Big surprise.

If the US military had anything close to real A.I., you wouldn't hear about it. It would be a classified information.

The NSA would love to have anything close to a system capable of understanding language as well as a native speaker can; as would the CIA, or any other clandestine organization. Any system smart enough to understand and generate English probably also came with a breakthrough in CS theory that will give them better tanks, planes, and communications systems. And those would be classified, too.

In short, this is just an excuse to spend money, and to hide the funding for any secret research projects that they really are working on.

Re:Humans???

[DragonWriter]

What's wrong with using humans?

The number of humans that the Pentagon can afford to employ with adequate skill in the languages it wants to target are inadequate to process all the channels of information it would like to filter for potentially interesting information, further, the more humans know what information is being looked for (and what is flagged), the greater the security risk.

Language parsing impossible by current technology

[master_p]

In order to recognize speech, one needs a context-sensitive parser. In order to make a context-sensitive parser which is fast enough to interpret the text, the computer should have the pattern-matching capacity of a grown up human. The human brain contains 500-1000 trillion synapses! even if one makes the assumption that one synapse equals one bit, in order to understand the context, one would need a computer with a tremendous amount of memory which could be searched in parallel.

Of course if you narrow the problem down to specific terms, then it is doable. But then it would not be 'ultimate' any more.

You have to walk before you can run

[Zontar_Thing_From_Ve]

Seriously though, I just don't believe it. I've worked on a number of DARPA robot projects, and have heard a lot of their babble. They claim to be funding all these fantastic ideas, but none of them ever work except in a limited capacity.

This is a big pipe dream that is extremely unlikely to work any time soon. How do I know that? Right now, I think it would be reasonable to conclude that computer technology today is good enough to do accurate text translation. Can it? Well, it depends on how picky you are. There are always mistakes, sometimes glaring ones, in text to text translation programs. I can speak Russian and for convenience (to get quick rough translations) at one time I owned what is probably the best Russian-English text translation program. It's much more accurate than Babelfish. It still left a lot to be desired. It would be about 80-90% accurate, but no more. I remember one time when it took a statement in Russian that said "I absolutely would not mind to tell you about ..." and translated it as "I absolutely would mind to tell you about ..." which is the exact opposite. Many languages, such as Russian, Spanish and Portuguese (and no doubt others) use double negatives to express negation. "I don't know nobody" is quite correct in Russian, Spanish and Portuguese although it is quite grammatically incorrect in English if your intention was to say "I don't know anybody". Programs that translate into English from languages that use double negatives often fail to correctly translate the negation. Maybe there are some that get it right, but I've never seen any. Text translation programs are very poor at distinguishing between words that have uses as different parts of speech. Here's an example:

She sings like an angel.

In this sentence, "like" is an adverb, but it can also be a verb ("She likes to go shopping."). A text translation program might fail to correctly understand that "like" is an adverb here and say something like:

She sings and angel is pleasing to her.

I could give a lot more examples, but these are enough. If we can't even do a better job right now at text translation, how on earth is DARPA going to get speech translation right? This is the kind of project that gets funded by idiots who have never studied foreign languages and believe that the Star Trek idea of a Universal Translator is only a few years away.

How to Wreck a Nice Beach

[J.R. Random]

Just say the title out loud to get some idea of why speech recognition is hard, nevermind translation. Translation has long been regarded as "AI-complete" because to do it well you have to understand what is being said, which involves solving all the other difficult AI problems. The current translation systems are lousy because they don't understand what is being said and most of them don't even attempt to.

So my guess is that this program will be a boondoggle for researchers with little practical result.