Tag Archives: superintelligent machine translation

How to translate ‘Cette phrase est en français’ ? (This sentence is in French) – updated

Let us consider the following French sentence: Le comté de Kronoberg est un comté suédois dont le nom signifie en français ‘Couronne de montagne’. It translates into Corsican: A cuntea di Kronoberg hè una cuntea svedese chì u so nome significheghja in francese ‘Curona di muntagna’. (The County of Kronoberg is a Swedish county whose name means in French ‘Mountain crown’.) But it should be translated more accurately as: A cuntea di Kronoberg hè una cuntea svedese situata in u sudu di u paese, è chì u so nome significheghja in corsu ‘Curona di muntagna’ since the words significheghja in francese (means in French) are utterly false.

Now a semantic difficulty is lurking whose core can be related to self-reference: How should we translate ‘Cette phrase est en français’ ? Self-reference stems here from ‘cette phrase’ (this sentence). Litterally, it translates into: This sentence is in French). But a sense-preserving translation would be: This sentence is in English).

A much complicated instance of self-reference within translation is as follows: ‘Cette phrase ne comprend que sept mots’ (This sentence contains only seven words). It translates into Corsican: ‘Ss’infrasata ùn cumprendi ch’è setti paroli. It is also true of the Corsican translation, but false of the English one, which includes only six words. Arguably, a better English translation, which is sense-preserving is then:
This sentence contains only six words. Such translation ability is currently beyond the scope of present MT. We can tag it as an ability that would be required from superintelligent MT. It would then include: identifying sef-referent parts of discourse, such as: this sentence, these words, this proposition, this paragraph, this text, … But not all self-referring discourse is concerned here. For example, the Liar paradox (this sentence is false) is irrelevant here, since we only place ourselves from the standpoint of MT. Interestingly, such superintelligent ability also requires some meta-knowledge, i.e. the language of the source text and of the target text. For a shift from the source language to the target language is needed here.

Superintelligent machine translation (updated)

Illustration from pixabay.com

Let us consider superintelligence with regard to machine translation. To fix ideas, we can propose a rough definition: it consists of a machine with the ability to translate with 99% (or above) accuracy from one of the 8000 languages to another. It seems relevant here to mention the present 8000 human languages, including some 4000 or 5000 languages which are at risk of extinction before the end of the XXIth century. It could also include relevantly some extinct languages which are somewhat well-described and meet the conditions for building rule-based translation. But arguably, this definition needs some additional criteria. What appears to be the most important is the ability to self-improve its performance. In practise, this could be done by reading or hearing texts. The superintelligent translation machine should be able to acquire new vocabulary from its readings or hearings: not only words and vocabulary, but also locutions (noun locutions, adjective locutions, adverbial locutions, verbal locutions, etc.). It should also be able to acquire new sentence structures from its readings and enrich its database of grammatical sentence structures. It should also be able to make grow its database of word meanings for ambiguous words and instantly build the associate disambiguation rules. In addition, it should be capable of detecting and implementing specific grammatical structures.
It seems superintelligence will be reached when the superintelligent translation machine will be able to perform all that without any human help.

Also relevant in this discussion is the fact, previously argued, that rule-based translation is better suited to endangered langages translation than statistic-based translation. Why? Because high-scale corpora do not exist for endangered languages. From the above definition of SMT, it follows that rule-based translation is also best suited to SMT, since it massively includes endangered languages (but arguably, statistic-based MT could still be used for translating main languages one into another).

Let us speculate now on how this path to superintelligent translation will be achieved. We can mention here:

  • a quantitative scenario: (i) acquire, fist, an ability to translate very accurately, say, 100 languages. (ii) develop, second, the ability to self-improve (iii) extend, third, the translation ability to whole set of 8000 human languages.
  • alternatively, there could be a qualitative scenario: (i) acquire, first, an ability to translate somewhat accurately the 8000 languages (the accuracy could vary from language to language, especially with rare endangered languages). (ii) suggest improvements to vocabulary, locutions, sentence structures, disambiguation rules, etc. that are verified and validated by human (iii) acquire, third, the ability to self-improve by reading texts or hearing conversations.
  • it is worth mentioning a third alternative that would consist of  an hybrid scenario, i.e. a mix of quantitative and qualitative improvements. It will be our preferred scenario.

But we should provide more details on how these steps could be achieved. To fix ideas, let us focus on the word self-improvement module: it allows the superintelligent machine translation to extend its vocabulary in any language. This could be accomplished by reading or hearing new texts in any language. When facing a new word, the superintelligent machine translation (SMT, for short) should be able to translate it instantly into the 8000 other languages and add it to its vocabulary database.

To give another example, another module would be locution self-improvement module: it allows the superintelligent machine translation to extend its locution knowledge in any language.

Also relevant to this topic is the following question: could SMT be achieved without AGI ( general AI)? We shall address this question later.