Artificial Intelligence Can Translate Languages Without a Dictionary

Two new research papers detail unsupervised machine-learning methods that can do language translation without dictionaries, as reported in Science. The methods also work without parallel text, or identical text that already exists in another language. The papers, completed independently of one another, use similar methods. Both projects start by building bilingual dictionaries without the aid of a human to say whether they were right or not. Each takes advantage of the fact that relationships between certain words, like tree and leaves or shoes and socks, are similar across languages.