A glitch with Google Translate has resulted in a series of mysterious messages and prophecies appearing when gibberish text is entered into the app. The translation service, which supports over 100 languages and serves over 500 million people each day, uses artificial intelligence to increase accuracy. But the technology has also caused an issue with some of the lesser-used languages. Typing in the word "dog" 18 times into Google Translate and selecting the input language as Maori results in the following message: "Doomsday Clock is three minutes at twelve We are experiencing characters and a dramatic developments in the world, which indicate that we are increasingly approaching the end times and Jesus' return." You can view your Google Maps History by visiting myactivity.google.com. In the search bar at the top of the page, you can filter by lots of different products, and Maps is one of them.

Tools and apps like Google Translate are getting better and better at translating one language into another. Alexander Waibel, professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University's Language Technologies Institute (@LTIatCMU), tells Here & Now's Jeremy Hobson how translation technology works, where there's still room to improve and what could be in store in the decades to come. "Over the years I think there's been a big trend on translation to go increasingly from rule-based, knowledge-based methods to learning methods. Systems have now really achieved a phenomenally good accuracy, and so I think, within our lifetime I'm fairly sure that we'll reach -- if we haven't already done so -- human-level performance, and/or exceeding it. "The current technology that really has taken the community by storm is of course neural machine translation.

When Google Translate converts news articles written in Spanish into English, phrases referring to women often become'he said' or'he wrote'. Software designed to warn people using Nikon cameras when the person they are photographing seems to be blinking tends to interpret Asians as always blinking. Word embedding, a popular algorithm used to process and analyse large amounts of natural-language data, characterizes European American names as pleasant and African American ones as unpleasant. These are just a few of the many examples uncovered so far of artificial intelligence (AI) applications systematically discriminating against specific populations. Biased decision-making is hardly unique to AI, but as many researchers have noted1, the growing scope of AI makes it particularly important to address.

We study open domain dialogue generation with dialogue acts designed to explain how people engage in social chat. To imitate human behavior, we propose managing the flow of human-machine interactions with the dialogue acts as policies. The policies and response generation are jointly learned from human-human conversations, and the former is further optimized with a reinforcement learning approach. With the dialogue acts, we achieve significant improvement over state-of-the-art methods on response quality for given contexts and dialogue length in both machine-machine simulation and human-machine conversation.

YOU'VE heard of it in movies or in passing conversations. Maybe your workplace uses it, or you're considering using it yourself. As technology continues to make ripples across the workplace, AI has become increasingly prevalent. Through AI, companies are able to analyse large amounts of data, which will allow them to better engage with customers. Today, AI is easily accessible.

We present an end-to-end approach that takes unstructured textual input and generates structured output compliant with a given vocabulary. Inspired by recent successes in neural machine translation, we treat the triples within a given knowledge graph as an independent graph language and propose an encoder-decoder framework with an attention mechanism that leverages knowledge graph embeddings. Our model learns the mapping from natural language text to triple representation in the form of subject-predicate-object using the selected knowledge graph vocabulary. Experiments on three different data sets show that we achieve competitive F1-Measures over the baselines using our simple yet effective approach. A demo video is included.

Neural attention has become central to many state-of-the-art models in natural language processing and related domains. Attention networks are an easy-to-train and effective method for softly simulating alignment; however, the approach does not marginalize over latent alignments in a probabilistic sense. This property makes it difficult to compare attention to other alignment approaches, to compose it with probabilistic models, and to perform posterior inference conditioned on observed data. A related latent approach, hard attention, fixes these issues, but is generally harder to train and less accurate. This work considers variational attention networks, alternatives to soft and hard attention for learning latent variable alignment models, with tighter approximation bounds based on amortized variational inference. We further propose methods for reducing the variance of gradients to make these approaches computationally feasible. Experiments show that for machine translation and visual question answering, inefficient exact latent variable models outperform standard neural attention, but these gains go away when using hard attention based training. On the other hand, variational attention retains most of the performance gain but with training speed comparable to neural attention.

This paper presents Memory Augmented Policy Optimization (MAPO): a novel policy optimization formulation that incorporates a memory buffer of promising trajectories to reduce the variance of policy gradient estimates for deterministic environments with discrete actions. The formulation expresses the expected return objective as a weighted sum of two terms: an expectation over a memory of trajectories with high rewards, and a separate expectation over the trajectories outside the memory. We propose 3 techniques to make an efficient training algorithm for MAPO: (1) distributed sampling from inside and outside memory with an actor-learner architecture; (2) a marginal likelihood constraint over the memory to accelerate training; (3) systematic exploration to discover high reward trajectories. MAPO improves the sample efficiency and robustness of policy gradient, especially on tasks with a sparse reward. We evaluate MAPO on weakly supervised program synthesis from natural language with an emphasis on generalization. On the WikiTableQuestions benchmark we improve the state-of-the-art by 2.5%, achieving an accuracy of 46.2%, and on the WikiSQL benchmark, MAPO achieves an accuracy of 74.9% with only weak supervision, outperforming several strong baselines with full supervision. Our code is open sourced at https://github.com/crazydonkey200/neural-symbolic-machines

Machine learning is one of the newest technologies that is poised to make significant changes in the way companies conduct their business. Machine learning refers to computer technology that relays intelligent output based on algorithmic decisions made after processing a user's input. While still in its infancy, machine learning has already started being rolled out to consumers through different applications, such as Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa, and Microsoft's Cortana, among others. Apart from voice, the technology is used to process image data (e.g. Various reports indicate that advanced machine learning systems will leave translators out of work in the near future.

Neural Machine Translation (NMT) has been widely adopted over recent years due to its advantages on various translation tasks. However, NMT systems can be error-prone due to the intractability of natural languages and the design of neural networks, bringing issues to their translations. These issues could potentially lead to information loss, wrong semantics, and low readability in translations, compromising the usefulness of NMT and leading to potential non-trivial consequences. Although there are existing approaches, such as using the BLEU score, on quality assessment and issue detection for NMT, such approaches face two serious limitations. First, such solutions require oracle translations, i.e., reference translations, which are often unavailable, e.g., in production environments. Second, such approaches cannot pinpoint the issue types and locations within translations. To address such limitations, we propose a new approach aiming to precisely detect issues in translations without requiring oracle translations. Our approach focuses on two most prominent issues in NMT translations by including two detection algorithms. Our experimental results show that our new approach could achieve high effectiveness on real-world datasets. Our successful experience on deploying the proposed algorithms in both the development and production environments of WeChat, a messenger app with over one billion of monthly active users, helps eliminate numerous defects of our NMT model, monitor the effectiveness on real-world translation tasks, and collect in-house test cases, producing high industry impact.