Hindrance in language? Google improves its translation tool
March 09, 2010
Source: New York Times

MOUNTAIN VIEW: In a meeting at Google in 2004, the discussion turned to an e-mail message the company had received from a fan in South Korea. Sergey Brin, a Google founder, ran the message through an automatic translation service that the company had licensed.

The result read: “The sliced raw fish shoes it wishes. Google green onion thing!”

Brin said Google ought to be able to do better. Six years later, its free Google Translate service handles 52 languages, more than any similar system, and people use it hundreds of millions of times a week to translate Web pages and other text.

“What you see on Google Translate is state of the art” in computer translations that are not limited to a particular subject area, said Alon Lavie, an associate research professor in the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University.

Google’s efforts to expand beyond searching the Web have met with mixed success. Its digital books project has been hung up in court, and the introduction of its social network, Buzz, raised privacy fears. The pattern suggests that it can sometimes misstep when it tries to challenge business traditions and cultural conventions.

But Google’s quick rise to the top echelons of the translation business is a reminder of what can happen when Google unleashes its brute-force computing power on complex problems.

The network of data centers that it built for Web searches may now be, when lashed together, the world’s largest computer. Google is using that machine to push the limits on translation technology. Last month, for example, it said it was working to combine its translation tool with image analysis, allowing a person to, say, take a cell phone photo of a menu in German and get an instant English translation.

“Machine translation is one of the best examples that shows Google’s strategic vision,” said Tim O’Reilly, founder and chief executive of the technology publisher O’Reilly Media. “It is not something that anyone else is taking very seriously. But Google understands something about data that nobody else understands, and it is willing to make the investments necessary to tackle these kinds of complex problems ahead of the market.”

Creating a translation machine has long been seen as one of the toughest challenges in artificial intelligence. For decades, computer scientists tried using a rules-based approach – teaching the computer the linguistic rules of two languages and giving it the necessary dictionaries.

But in the mid-1990s, researchers began favoring a so-called statistical approach. They found that if they fed the computer thousands or millions of passages and their human-generated translations, it could learn to make accurate guesses about how to translate new texts.

It turns out that this technique, which requires huge amounts of data and lots of computing horsepower, is right up Google’s alley.

“Our infrastructure is very well-suited to this,” Vic Gundotra, a vice president for engineering at Google, said. “We can take approaches that others can’t even dream of.”

Automated translation systems are far from perfect, and even Google’s will not put human translators out of a job anytime soon. Experts say it is exceedingly difficult for a computer to break a sentence into parts, then translate and reassemble them. But Google’s service is good enough to convey the essence of a newspaper article, and it has become a quick source for translations for millions of people.

“If you need a rough-and-ready translation, it’s the place to go,” said Philip Resnik, a machine translation expert and associate professor of linguistics at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Like its rivals in the field, most notably Microsoft and IBM, Google has fed its translation engine with transcripts of U.N. proceedings, which are translated by humans into six languages, and those of the European Parliament, which are translated into 23. This raw material is used to train translation systems for the most common languages.

But Google has scoured the text of the Web, as well as data from its book scanning project and other sources, to move beyond those languages. For more obscure languages, it has released a “translator tool kit” that helps users with translations and then adds those texts to its database.

Google’s offering could put a dent in sales of corporate translation software from companies like IBM. But automated translation is never likely to be a big moneymaker, at least not by the standards of Google’s advertising business. Still, Google’s efforts could pay off in several ways.

Because Google’s ads are ubiquitous online, anything that makes it easier for people to use the Web benefits the company. And the system could lead to interesting new applications. Last week, the company said it would use speech recognition to generate captions for English-language YouTube videos, which could then be translated into 50 other languages.

“This technology can make the language barrier go away,” said Franz Och, a principal scientist at Google who leads the company’s machine translation team. “It would allow anyone to communicate with anyone else.”

Och, a German researcher who previously worked at the University of Southern California, said he was initially reluctant to join Google, fearing it would treat translation as a side project. Larry Page, Google’s other founder, called to reassure him.

“He basically said that this is something that is very important for Google,” Och recalled recently. Och signed on in 2004 and was soon able to put Page’s promise to the test.

While many translation systems like Google’s use up to a billion words of text to create a model of a language, Google went much bigger: a few hundred billion English words. “The models become better and better the more text you process,” Och said.

The effort paid off. A year later, Google won a government-run competition that tests sophisticated translation systems.

Google has used a similar approach – immense computing power, heaps of data and statistics – to tackle other complex problems. In 2007, for example, it began offering 800-GOOG-411, a free directory assistance service that interprets spoken requests. It allowed Google to collect the voices of millions of people so it could get better at recognizing spoken English.

A year later, Google released a search-by-voice system that was as good as those that took other companies years to build.

And late last year, Google introduced a service called Goggles that analyzes cell phone photos, matching them to a database of more than a billion online images, including photos of streets taken for its Street View service.

Och acknowledged that Google’s translation system still needed improvement, but he said it was getting better fast. “The current quality improvement curve is still pretty steep,” he said.

It’s time to stop playing blind man’s bluff
March 09, 2010
Source: REUTERS

LOS ANGELES: The Internet was built on freedom of expression. Society wants someone held accountable when that freedom is abused. And major Internet companies like Google and Facebook are finding themselves caught between those ideals.

Although Google, News Corp's Facebook and their rivals have enjoyed a relatively "safe harbor" from prosecution over user-generated content in the United States and Europe, they face a public increasingly more inclined to blame them for cyber-bullying and other online transgressions.

Such may have been the case when three Google executives were convicted in Milan, Italy on Feb 24 over a bullying video posted on the site -- a verdict greeted with horror by online activists, who fear it could open the gates to such prosecutions and ultimately destroy the Internet itself.

Journalist Jeff Jarvis suggested on his influential BuzzMachine blog that the Italian court, which found Google executives guilty of violating the privacy of an autistic boy who was taunted in the video, was essentially requiring websites to review everything posted on them.

"The practical implication of that, of course, is that no one will let anyone put anything online because the risk is too great," Jarvis wrote.

"I wouldn't let you post anything here. My ISP (Internet Service Provider) wouldn't let me post anything on its services. And that kills the Internet." A seemingly stunned Chris Thompson, writing for Slate, said simply: "The mind reels at this medieval verdict."

Legal experts have been more sanguine, saying the verdict in Milan will most likely end up an outlier -- unable to stand the scrutiny even of the Italian appeals courts, never mind setting legal precedents elsewhere. But in sentencing the executives to six-month suspended jail terms, the court may have seized on a growing desire to hold Internet companies responsible for the content posted by users.

"I actually think that this is probably not a watershed moment because the Google convictions violate European law and ultimately they will be overturned," said John Morris, general counsel for the Washington, DC-based Center for Democracy and Technology.

"Having said that, yes we are quite worried about the trend in other countries to suggest Internet service providers and Web sites should be the policemen of the Internet," Morris said. If the trend takes hold, it could put the companies on the defensive, forcing them to spend more time defending such cases or fending off calls to restrict content in some way.

China polices the web and demands cooperation from web companies, while the United States has stuck up for Internet freedom in the face of censorship by more repressive governments.

But social pressure often comes from the ground up, as Facebook recently found out in Australia. In that case Facebook pages set up in tribute to two children murdered in February, 8-year-old Trinity Bates and 12-year-old Elliott Fletcher, were quickly covered with obscenities and pornography, prompting calls for the social network to be more accountable for its content.

"To have these things happen to Facebook pages set up for the sole purpose of helping these communities pay tribute to young lives lost in the most horrible ways adds to the grief already being experienced," Queensland Premier Ann Bligh wrote to Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a letter released to the Australian media. "I seek your advice about whether Facebook can do anything to prevent a recurrence of these types of sickening incidents," Bligh said in the letter.

A Facebook spokeswoman responded that the popular social network, which has more than 400 million users worldwide, had rules to check content and that any reports of hate or threats would be quickly removed.

"Facebook is highly self-regulating and users can and do report content that they find questionable or offensive," the spokeswoman, Debbie Frost, said. Calls for prosecution of cyber-bullying first reached a peak with the case of a suburban mother accused of driving a love-lorn 13-year-old girl, Megan Meier, to suicide in 2006 by tormenting her with a fake MySpace persona.

Lori Drew, the mother of a girl with whom Meir had quarreled, was found guilty of misdemeanor federal charges in a case dubbed the "MySpace Suicide" in the US media, but a judge later dismissed her conviction on the grounds that the prosecution was selective the law unconstitutionally vague.

But Meier's death and a series of child exploitation cases linked to MySpace brought pressure on the site to increase its security measures and may have cost it in its apparently losing rivalry with Facebook for social network dominance.

Such issues point to the business risks for the likes of Google and Facebook as they seek to reconcile demands for accountability with the impossibility of monitoring everything posted on their sites.

"We are a society that expects companies and people of authority to take responsibility, not only for their own actions but for the actions of those beneath them," said Karen North, director of the Annenberg Program on Online Communities at the University of Southern California.

"The difficulty is, we've created an Internet culture where people are invited to put up content, but the responsibility falls in both directions," North said. "(On the Internet) we all share the responsibility to monitor the content that we find and for our societal standards to be maintained."

How to get better at Twitter
March 09, 2010
SOURCE: New York Times

Common reason given by those who have yet to try Twitter: “I have nothing to say.”

The truth is, you don’t have to post a message to get the most out of Twitter. At its best, the social medium is a perpetual, personalised news service about topics of your choosing — whether health care reform, tech news or the latest episode of “Gossip Girl” — filtered and served to you by people who care a lot about what you care a lot about.

Even the most prolific users say Twitter has become more useful as a way to tap in to the discussions of the day than to broadcast their own thoughts. And once you get pulled in, you might just find you have something to say after all.

Biz Stone, Twitter’s co-founder, suggests that naysayers simply log on to Twitter’s home page and search for a topic they are interested in, whether it’s their favorite sports team, the name of their company or a topic in the news. Within a minute, they understand the appeal, he said.

Twitter users write 50 million messages a day. For the holdouts, here are a few ways to make Twitter work for you.

A custom news feed

By the time Bridget Baker, who works in public relations in Seattle, checks Google Reader while eating lunch at her desk, she has already read most of the articles in her feed because she saw them on Twitter.

In the year since she joined, she has written only 17 posts. “I tend to be a pretty private person. and I don’t feel I have anything that needs to be said,” she said. Yet she opens Twitter first thing each morning and follows friends, bloggers and thought leaders who post about politics, religion, fashion and food.

People with shared interests become your editor and Twitter becomes an alternative RSS feed. Find those people by searching Twitter directories, like WeFollow or Just Tweet It, and by following people whom others repeat or mention.

One-fifth of posts and 57 percent of repeat messages contain a link, proving that this is an increasingly popular way to spread news, said Dan Zarrella, a social media scientist who works at a software company called HubSpot. A quick scan reveals the news of the moment as the most important stories of the day bubble up and are reposted.

Check your lists

Twitter is such a fast-moving stream that you may not want to follow everyone who posts about your interests. That’s one reason Twitter invented Lists, which anyone can create. Someone could separate celebrity users, owners of food carts in New York or tech pundits, for example, so they get an unadulterated stream of news on only the topic they want at that moment.

If you don’t know who the best users are on a favorite topic, look for Lists on sites like Listorious or by checking profiles.

Janessa Goldbeck works in Washington for a rights organization, the Genocide Intervention Network. Each morning, she checks a few Twitter Lists of people who work in human rights. “I don’t want to follow all those people, but I can get a snapshot of the landscape each day by looking at the Lists,” she said. “It’s the quickest, most personalized news filter you could imagine.”

Attend a conference, virtually

Most conferences these days have a Twitter hashtag. At the exclusive TED conference in Long Beach, Calif., in February, for example, attendees added #TED to the end of their posts.

By searching #TED on Twitter, people could read the latest updates (and skip the $6,000 attendance fee). People wrote quotes from the speakers, like this one: “ ‘If I only had only one wish for the next 50 years, it’d be to invent the thing that halves the cost of CO2’ — Bill Gates #TED.”

Others told us what we were lucky to be missing: “last talk on evolution #TED was obvious, boring and put audience to sleep.”

What’s around you right now?

Twitter is working on ways to deliver news nearby, like alerts about an earthquake or the closing of a bridge, Mr. Stone said.

Some Twitter apps, like Tweetie and TwitterLocal, let you search posts near you. Check the Web site Happn.in to see the most discussed topics in your area.

People are coming up with makeshift ways to do something similar. During the recent snowstorm in Washington, people added #snowpocalypse to the end of their posts. By searching that term, Ms. Goldbeck said she read news about closings of government offices and Metro stops before she heard it elsewhere.

Ask questions

Once your Twitter writer’s block lifts, you can use Twitter to ask questions when you don’t know whom to ask.

Ask where to eat dinner in a new city, for example, or how to extend your iPhone’s battery life, and you are sure to get answers.

Some people are even using Twitter for more urgent questions. Bertalan Meskó, a medical student at the University of Debrecen in Hungary, wrote a post about a patient with mysterious symptoms: “Strange case today in internal medicine rotation. 16 years old boy with acute pancreatitis (for the 6th! time). Any ideas?”

Within hours, specialists worldwide had responded, suggesting gallstones, lupus or growths on the pancreas. One of the suggestions helped the doctors with a diagnosis.

“It would have been impossible to find that specialist through e-mail, because we had no idea who to contact,” Mr Meskó said.