Translating from one language to another is hard, and creating a system that does it automatically is a major challenge, partly because there are just so many words, phrases and rules to deal with. Fortunately, neural networks eat big, complicated data sets for breakfast. Google has been working on a machine learning translation technique for years, and today is its official debut.
The Google Neural Machine Translation system, deployed today for Chinese-English queries, is a step up in complexity from existing methods. Here’s how things have evolved (in a nutshell).
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This article questions some of the research assumptions made by Google, especially the validity and value of the side-by-side rating and also questions the excessive and unwarranted by reality hyperbole of the press announcements http://kv-emptypages.blogspot.com/2016/09/the-google-neural-machine-translation.html
This is an article that questions the veracity of these claims by 10 different MT experts and puts them in a more realistic perspective as the announcement is clearly an overstatement of the actual accomplishment. https://slator.com/technology/hyperbolic-experts-weigh-in-on-google-neural-translate/