Microsoft has announced that it has created first machine human-level Chinese to English translation. It is one of a kind Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered machine system that can translate sentences of news articles from Chinese to English with the same quality and accuracy as humans.
Researchers from both USA and Asia said that their system has achieved human parity on a commonly used test set of news stories named newstest2017 which was developed by a group of industry and academic partners and released at a research conference WMT17 last fall. Post the tests, the company says that the results are accurate and on par with human-level.
The team said that they have hired external bilingual human evaluators, who compared the Microsoft’s results to two independently produced human reference translations. The company is calling it a major milestone in one of the most challenging natural language processing tasks. The team used the dual-learning method meaning that a sentence which is sent to translation from Chinese to English, was also translated it back from English to Chinese. This method made sure the translation accurate, and it allowed the system to refine and learn from its own mistakes.
Xuedong Huang, a technical member in charge of Microsoft’s speech, natural language, and machine translation efforts said:
It a major milestone in one of the most challenging natural language processing tasks. Hitting human parity in a machine translation task is a dream that all of us have had. We just didn’t realize we’d be able to hit it so soon. The translation milestone was especially gratifying because of the possibilities it has for helping people understand each other better. The pursuit of removing language barriers to help people communicate better is fantastic. t’s very, very rewarding.