Google has extended the same “statistical machine learning” it so successfully uses for spelling — the did you mean… functionality — to language translation. With that comes a different path to AI:
Creating a translation machine has long been seen as one of the toughest challenges in artificial intelligence. For decades, computer scientists tried using a rules-based approach — teaching the computer the linguistic rules of two languages and giving it the necessary dictionaries.
But in the mid-1990s, researchers began favoring a so-called statistical approach. They found that if they fed the computer thousands or millions of passages and their human-generated translations, it could learn to make accurate guesses about how to translate new texts.
Extensions of the functionality include a free directory assistance service, 800-GOOG-411, a voice search system and Google Goggles, a search based on matching photos taken by a cellphone. Imagined future functionality includes translating a cellphone photo of, for example, a German menu into English.
RELATED: Yesterday, Google launched its Public Data Explorer. Specifically designed for avid data crunchers, it’s pretty cool: