Experts believe that machine translation good enough to replace advanced human translators will be widespread within five to 10 years, as language-processing technology has seen many breakthroughs in recent years, Xinhuanet.com reported on May 22.
Zhou Ming, standing deputy dean of Microsoft Research Asia, made the statement in his keynote speech at the 2017 Global Artificial Intelligence Technology Conference, held in Beijing on May 22. Machine translation currently faces challenges that prevent it from reaching the standards of professional translation, Zhou noted. However, he also pointed out that several technology companies are now focusing on machine translation, and have already made great progress.
Google released its translation system in September 2016, based on recurrent neural networks. In addition, the artificial intelligence team at Facebook claimed to have achieved the highest accuracy yet in machine translation by using brand new neural network technology, with a translating speed nine times that of Google.
Apart from translation, Zhou speculated that language-processing technology, integrated with other artificial intelligence, could be applied in many fields including education, medicine and driverless cars in the near future.