[This article originally appeared on Kirti Vashee’s Blog]
This is the final post for the 2017 year, a guest post by Jean Senellart who has been a serious MT practitioner for around 40 years, with deep expertise in all the technology paradigms that have been used to do machine translation. SYSTRAN has recently been running tests building MT systems with different datasets and parameters to evaluate how data and parameter variation affect MT output quality. As Jean said:
” We are continuously feeding data to a collection of models with different parameters – and at each iteration, we change the parameters. We have systems that are being evaluated in this setup for about 2 months and we see that they continue to learn.”
This is more of a vision statement about the future evolution of this (MT) technology, where they continue to learn and improve, rather than a direct reporting of experimental results, and I think is a fitting way to end the year in this blog.
It is very clear to most of us that deep learning based approaches are the way forward for continued MT technology evolution. However, skill with this technology will come with experimentation and understanding of data quality and control parameters. Babies learn by exploration and experimentation, and maybe we need to approach our continued learning, in the same way, learning from purposeful play. Is this not the way that intelligence evolves? Many experts say that AI is going to be driving learning and evolution in business practices in almost every sphere of business.