Artificial intelligence goes bilingual--without a dictionary - Nova Languages

Automatic language translation has come a long way, thanks to neural networks--computer algorithms that take inspiration from the human brain. But training such networks requires an enormous amount of data: millions of sentence-by-sentence translations to demonstrate how a human would do it. Now, two new papers show that neural networks can learn to translate with no parallel texts--a surprising advance that could make documents in many languages more accessible. "Imagine that you give one person lots of Chinese books and lots of Arabic books--none of them overlapping--and the person has to learn to translate Chinese to Arabic. That seems impossible, right?" says the first author of one study, Mikel Artetxe, a computer scientist at the University of the Basque Country (UPV) in San Sebastiàn, Spain.