[Corpora-List] Google's translations

[John F. Sowa]

 > Clearly the massive amount of English training data has certain
 > extremely unfortunate consequences for the choice of lexical items.
 > It is amusing, but could be potentially very confusing, when one
 > currency is translated to another (but not recalculated!).,,
 >
 > Olje koster kr 800 fatet. Gassen koster NOK 400 mens vindkraft
 > koster seksti kroner.
 >
 > Oil costs U.S. $ 800 per barrel. The gas costs NOK 400, while
 > wind power costs sixty kroner.

That is an example where some rule-based processing should be
added as a supplement to statistical methods.  It could recognize
pairs of (unit, value) and either translate both or leave both
unchanged.

Wolfram's Alpha system (which is used in Microsoft's Bing) can
handle such examples.  I typed "What is 400 NOK in dollars?"
to Bing.com and got the answer

    400 NOK = 68.38800 USD

For "What is sixty kroner in dollars?", Wolfram didn't do anything,
but the first two hits in Bing were web sites for converting
Danish kroner and Norwegian kroner.

For "What is kr 800 in dollars?" the first hit was a web site
with the title "What is 800 euros in dollars? - Yahoo! Answers"

John Sowa


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