Researchers work on translator that supports world’s 7,000 languages

PanARMENIAN.Net - A team of 10 researchers and students from USC Viterbi’s Information Sciences Institute, led by research director Kevin Knight, hopes to build machine-learning systems to quickly decrypt any of the world’s 7,000 languages and automatically produce information that can be acted on, USC Viterbi’s website said.

To hone their algorithms, Knight and the team from ISI’s Natural Language Lab recently took part in a three-week assignment to translate Oromo and Tigrinya — two Ethiopian languages spoken by millions — and yet unknown to machine-translation systems. Current online translation services support only about 100 of the world’s languages.

The assignment was part of a project overseen by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which aims to create a rapid automated language toolkit for languages currently missing from the linguistic databases that feed online translations systems.

By creating platforms that could be used in any region where international disaster relief teams have little or no local language expertise, the team hopes to get a step closer to the holy grail of machine translation: a universal translator that supports all the world’s languages.

“Let’s say there’s an earthquake in Armenia — the language they speak in that area is probably not covered with current technology,” Knight said.

“We want to be able to look at these messages and say: These are the ones that are describing the earthquake, these are the ones that are asking for food and water. That way, the aid organization knows, for example, what food and supplies to put on trucks and where to send them.”

Machine translation relies on huge annotated datasets: the bigger the dataset, the better it learns. But since massive datasets don’t exist for low-resource languages, including Oromo and Tigrinya, the team had to forage for clues using its artificial intelligence toolkit.