Translating from one language to another is hard, and creating a system that does it automatically is a major challenge, partly because there’s 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.
