Microsoft bot expertly translates news from Chinese to English
Team of researchers at Microsoft claim a milestone in artificial intelligence with human quality Chinese to English translation of news articles
Journalists with bilingual skills may see their days numbered after Microsoft said it hit a “historic milestone” in developing a machine to match human level translation of news from Chinese to English.
A team of Microsoft researchers said on Wednesday they have developed the first machine translation system that has the same quality and accuracy as a person when translating Chinese news articles to English.
Researchers in Microsoft’s Asia and US labs said in an official company blog post that their system achieved “human parity” after testing on a sample set that includes about 2,000 sentences from various online newspapers. To further verify the translation accuracy of its machine, Microsoft hired external bilingual human evaluators.
“Hitting human parity in a machine translation task is a dream that all of us have had,” said Xuedong Huang, a US-based technical fellow in charge of Microsoft’s speech, natural language and machine translation efforts. “We just didn’t realise we’d be able to hit it so soon,” he said in the blog post.
According to a joint artificial intelligence impact research done by Oxford and Yale, based on a survey last year of 352 machine learning experts, AI wasn’t seen outperforming humans in translation until 2024.