Researchers have created an AI system that teaches itself new languages

Computers have become much more adept at translating from one language into another in recent years, thanks to the application of neural networks. However, these AI systems usually require a lot of content translated by humans for the computers to learn from, while two new papers demonstrate that it's possible to develop a system that doesn't rely on parallel texts. Mikel Artetxe, a computer scientist at the University of the Basque Country (UPV) and the author of one of these papers, compares the situation to giving someone various books in Chinese and various books in Arabic, without any of the same texts overlapping. A human would find it very difficult to learn how to translate from Chinese into Arabic in this scenario, but a computer might not. In a typical machine-learning process, the AI system would be supervised.