Google’s Machine Translation Improvements

Well, I specifically excluded Google’s MT work from my coverage of their well orchestrated PR event yesterday, as I wanted to give it special treatment.

(Can you tell I’m enjoying my new found bandwidth?!)

I wanted to tie in my previous touch on the subject (tying Podcasts, Transcripts, Blogging, Machine Translation, IVR and Web Services together)… but then Om went and said what was worth saying:

“Translation work being done by the Labs merits a UN award. In case the Europeans are reading this, today was ample proof, that Google is more devoted to the UN and the world, and many of our esteemed leaders in Washington.

This perhaps was the most seat gripping part of the whole day. Google took hundreds of thousands of documents translated by the United Nations, matched them up with terabytes of data, and throw billions of gigahertz cycles at the problem and came up with a translation engine, that puts everything in context.

Remember context, for it is going to be the key operative word in the future. Using its complex algorithms, Gooligans are figuring out ways to put context to unstructured data, context like time and date and language. It will be interesting to see how Google becomes a context company. Unfortunately, it is my postulation. Google did not provide enough context to its amazing achievement as yet, but still impressive nevertheless. “

The rest of his take on the Factory Tour and his unmet expectations is pretty funny; give it a read.

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