Google's AI just created its own universal 'language'
Google's AI just created its own universal 'language'
The technology used in Google Translate can identify
hidden material between languages to create what's known as interlingua
By MATT BURGESS Wednesday 23 November 2016
Google has previously taught its artificial intelligence
to play games, and it's even capable of creating its own encryption. Now, its
language translation tool has used machine learning to create a 'language' all
of its own.
In September, the search giant turned on its Google
Neural Machine Translation (GNMT) system to help it automatically improve how
it translates languages. The machine learning system analyses and makes sense
of languages by looking at entire sentences – rather than individual phrases or
words.
Following several months of testing, the researchers
behind the AI have seen it be able to blindly translate languages even if it's
never studied one of the languages involved in the translation. "An
example of this would be translations between Korean and Japanese where Korean⇄Japanese examples were not shown to
the system," the Mike Schuster, from Google Brain wrote in a
blogpost.
The team said the system was able to make
"reasonable" translations of the languages it had not been taught to
translate. In one instance, a research paper published alongside the blog, says
the AI was taught Portuguese→English and English→Spanish. It was then able to
make translations between Portuguese→Spanish.
"To our knowledge, this is the first demonstration
of true multilingual zero-shot translation," the paper explains. To make
the system more accurate, the computer scientists then added additional data to
the system about the languages.
However, the most remarkable feat of the research paper
isn't that an AI can learn to translate languages without being shown examples
of them first; it was the fact it used this skill to create its own 'language'.
"Visual interpretation of the results shows that these models learn a form
of interlingua representation for the multilingual model between all involved
language pairs," the researchers wrote in the paper.
An interlingua is a type of artificial language, which is
used to fulfil a purpose. In this case, the interlingua was used within the AI
to explain how unseen material could be translated.
"Using a 3-dimensional representation of internal
network data, we were able to take a peek into the system as it translated a
set of sentences between all possible pairs of the Japanese, Korean, and
English languages," the team's blogpost continued. The data within the
network allowed the team to interpret that the neural network was
"encoding something" about the semantics of a sentence rather than
comparing phrase-to-phrase translations.
"We interpret this as a sign of existence of an
interlingua in the network," the team said. As a result of the work, the
Multilingual Google Neural Machine Translation is now being used across all of
Google Translate and the firm said multilingual systems are involved in the
translation of 10 of the 16 newest language pairs.
The research from the Google Brain team follows its
recent work that taught AI to create a form of encryption. In a research paper
published online, the scientists created three neural networks: Alice, Bob, and
Eve. Each of the networks was given its own job. One to create encryption, one
to receive it and decode a message, and the final to attempt to decrypt the
message without having encryption keys.
After training, the AIs were able to convert plain text
messages into encrypted messages, using its own form of encryption and then
decode the messages.
Comments
Post a Comment