What is Neural Machine Translation?

 

Google Translate's Neural Machine Translation Technology

Google Translate has been using neural machine translation (NMT) technology since 2016. This has resulted in more natural and accurate translations compared to traditional machine translation.

What is Neural Machine Translation?

Neural machine translation (NMT) is a machine translation technique that utilizes deep learning. Unlike traditional statistical machine translation (SMT), NMT treats an entire sentence as a single unit and translates it based on context.

Specifically, it employs two neural networks:

• Encoder: Converts the input language sentence into a vector that represents its meaning.
• Decoder: Converts the vector outputted by the encoder into the output language sentence.

By repeatedly training this encoder-decoder system, higher translation accuracy can be achieved.

Key Features of NMT in Google Translate

Google Translate's NMT has the following features:

• Context-aware translation: Translates based on the context of the entire sentence, not just individual words or phrases, resulting in more natural expressions.
• Multilingual translation: Supports translation between over 100 languages, including English and Chinese.
• Continuous learning: Continuously learns from new data, leading to ongoing improvements in translation accuracy.

Challenges of NMT

While NMT offers numerous advantages over traditional SMT, it also faces certain challenges:

• Training data: NMT requires a massive amount of training data. This can lead to lengthy training times and lower translation accuracy for rare languages.
• Interpretability: NMT models are often considered black boxes, making it difficult to explain the reasoning behind translation results.

Future Outlook

Despite its challenges, NMT holds immense potential to revolutionize machine translation by significantly improving translation accuracy. Future advancements are expected to address the issues of training data and interpretability, paving the way for even more natural and accurate translations.

References

• Why is Google Translate so popular? Is machine translation a panacea?: https://www.crosslanguage.co.jp/blog/nmt-smt-rbmt/
• What's the AI behind Google Translate? A look at its history and latest developments: https://tmjjapan.co.jp/topics/10117/
• Google Translate adopts neural machine translation technology, starting with Chinese to English: https://www.itmedia.co.jp/news/articles/1609/28/news085.html