Multilingual Neural Machine Translation in the Wild

arxiv.org

25 pointshardmaru4 comments

People working on machine traslation need to figure out what is it that https://www.deepl.com/translator is doing, and then do the same thing. All sorts of papers get presented claiming "state of the art" results on translation, and meanwhile Deepl is sitting there in the corner, smiling, and offering translation which is so much better than the purported "state of the art" (and rather obviously so) it's not even funny.

"People working on machine translation" also release their findings and sometimes even code for the benefit of everyone.

Yes, but this is one of those rare areas where the purported academic "state of the art" is far below the _actual_ state of the art in the industry. Don't get me wrong, I'm grateful that they're releasing results at all, and NLP has gotten really exciting in the past couple of years thanks to those publications. It's just that there seems to be a bit of a research bubble going on and people are veering into ever more exotic and obscure problems before they've achieved _actual_ SOTA result on even some of the most common language pairs.

(This is from the Google AI team.)

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