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 Machine Translation


As Google AI researcher accused of harassment, female data scientists speak of 'broken system'

The Guardian

The Duke University professor was at a statistics conference last year when, she said, she witnessed Steven Scott, a senior artificial intelligence (AI) researcher at Google, make sexual advances on one of her female students. According to Heller, when she spoke to Scott later at an event dinner, he was defensive and told the professor that she should be nice to him considering that he had secured her a Google-funded faculty research award. Artificial Intelligence has various definitions, but in general it means a program that uses data to build a model of some aspect of the world. This model is then used to make informed decisions and predictions about future events. The technology is used widely, to provide speech and face recognition, language translation, and personal recommendations on music, film and shopping sites.


A quick look at Machine Translation with Amazon Translate

#artificialintelligence

Amazon Translate is a new service announced at AWS re:Invent 2017. At the time of writing, it is available in preview. Please consider joining it and sending us feedback! Let's try it on a few examples. Please keep in mind that the service is still in preview and that it's constantly learning: imperfections will quickly be fixed thanks to customer feedback.


AI-augmented government

#artificialintelligence

While EMMA is a relatively simple application, developers are thinking bigger as well: Today's cognitive technologies can track the course, speed, and destination of nearly 2,000 airliners at a time, allowing them to fly safely.4 Over time, AI will spawn massive changes in the public sector, transforming how government employees get work done. It's likely to eliminate some jobs, lead to the redesign of countless others, and create entirely new professions.5 In the near term, our analysis suggests, large government job losses are unlikely. But cognitive technologies will change the nature of many jobs--both what gets done and how workers go about doing it--freeing up to one quarter of many workers' time to focus on other activities.


Rationalization: A Neural Machine Translation Approach to Generating Natural Language Explanations

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We introduce AI rationalization, an approach for generating explanations of autonomous system behavior as if a human had performed the behavior. We describe a rationalization technique that uses neural machine translation to translate internal state-action representations of an autonomous agent into natural language. We evaluate our technique in the Frogger game environment, training an autonomous game playing agent to rationalize its action choices using natural language. A natural language training corpus is collected from human players thinking out loud as they play the game. We motivate the use of rationalization as an approach to explanation generation and show the results of two experiments evaluating the effectiveness of rationalization. Results of these evaluations show that neural machine translation is able to accurately generate rationalizations that describe agent behavior, and that rationalizations are more satisfying to humans than other alternative methods of explanation.


Sockeye: A Toolkit for Neural Machine Translation

arXiv.org Machine Learning

We describe Sockeye (version 1.12), an open-source sequence-to-sequence toolkit for Neural Machine Translation (NMT). Sockeye is a production-ready framework for training and applying models as well as an experimental platform for researchers. Written in Python and built on MXNet, the toolkit offers scalable training and inference for the three most prominent encoder-decoder architectures: attentional recurrent neural networks, self-attentional transformers, and fully convolutional networks. Sockeye also supports a wide range of optimizers, normalization and regularization techniques, and inference improvements from current NMT literature. Users can easily run standard training recipes, explore different model settings, and incorporate new ideas. In this paper, we highlight Sockeye's features and benchmark it against other NMT toolkits on two language arcs from the 2017 Conference on Machine Translation (WMT): English-German and Latvian-English. We report competitive BLEU scores across all three architectures, including an overall best score for Sockeye's transformer implementation. To facilitate further comparison, we release all system outputs and training scripts used in our experiments. The Sockeye toolkit is free software released under the Apache 2.0 license.


AWS SageMaker brings machine learning to developers

#artificialintelligence

Amazon Web Services released a tool this week to empower developers to build smarter, artificial intelligence-driven applications like the AI experts. The role of the software tester has undergone significant upheaval and change in recent years. To help get you situated in today's landscape, we filled this guide with advice, research, and user reviews of popular test management tools. You forgot to provide an Email Address. This email address doesn't appear to be valid.


Counterfactual Learning from Bandit Feedback under Deterministic Logging: A Case Study in Statistical Machine Translation

arXiv.org Machine Learning

The goal of counterfactual learning for statistical machine translation (SMT) is to optimize a target SMT system from logged data that consist of user feedback to translations that were predicted by another, historic SMT system. A challenge arises by the fact that risk-averse commercial SMT systems deterministically log the most probable translation. The lack of sufficient exploration of the SMT output space seemingly contradicts the theoretical requirements for counterfactual learning. We show that counterfactual learning from deterministic bandit logs is possible nevertheless by smoothing out deterministic components in learning. This can be achieved by additive and multiplicative control variates that avoid degenerate behavior in empirical risk minimization. Our simulation experiments show improvements of up to 2 BLEU points by counterfactual learning from deterministic bandit feedback.


AI translates chemistry to predict reaction outcomes

@machinelearnbot

IBM researchers have developed a program that can predict the products of organic chemistry reactions.1 Modelled on the latest language translation systems โ€“ like Google's artificial neural network โ€“ the AI picked the right product 80% of the time despite not having been taught any organic chemistry rules. 'What this tool is trying to do is imitate a top pro chemist in more or less the entire domain of organic chemistry,' says Teodoro Laino, one of the researchers involved in the study at IBM in Zurich, Switzerland. His ambitious goal is shared by other chemists who have been attempting to create a functioning AI chemist since the 1970s, when organic chemist E J Corey kick-started the field by creating a chemical knowledge database. However, making a tool based on chemistry knowledge can be time-consuming; Bartosz Grzybowski's team took 10 years to encode their Chematica retrosynthesis program with 20,000 chemical rules. Moreover, a knowledge-based AI has difficulty tackling reactions that lie outside of its rule set. 'There's a way to learn organic chemistry that's not memorising chemical rules, by just trying to find out the underlying patterns in reactions and trying to rationalise them,' Laino says, explaining the approach that his team took.


In the Pearl River Delta's electronics souks, AI lets the haggling happen

#artificialintelligence

The electronics markets of Shenzhen are bewildering. These football-field-sized buildings seemingly sell almost anything, any bit of electronics โ€“ chip, component, connector โ€“ if you know where to look among the myriad stores in the ten-storey towers. To find find what you need in that riot of abundance you have to ask someone. But as an Australian-American lacking Chinese language skills, a question like "Do you know where I can find PIC16 microcontrollers?" doesn't have much chance of success. Pointing works when there's something to point at, but but lacks subtlety.


Machine Translation to Shakespearian English โ€“ Towards Data Science

#artificialintelligence

If you've been following the latest developments in deep learning, you've probably come across artistic style transfer. It's a technique to create a new image with the content of image A, in the style of image B. For example, below is the result of style transfer from a Kandinsky painting to a photo of Neil deGrasse Tyson. Deep learning has also had success in transferring verbal style. Given a 1-minute audio clip of someone talking, Lyrebird is able to capture that person's speaking style and make him say anything by mimicking his voice. I was curious to see if style transfer could also apply to the written word. The idea was to dress up English sentences in the styles of various authors, be it florid poetry or gruff prose, while preserving meaning.