Google Neural Machine Translation

The Google Brain project was established in 2011 in the "secretive Google X research lab" Ng's work has led to some of the biggest breakthroughs at Google and Stanford. In November 2016, Google Neural Machine Translation system (GNMT) was introduced. Since then, Google Translate began using neural machine translation (NMT) in preference to its previous statistical methods (SMT) which had been used since October 2007, with its proprietary, in-house SMT technology. Training GNMT was a big effort at the time and took, by a 2018 OpenAI estimate, on the order of 79 petaFLOP-days (or 7e21 FLOPs) of compute which was 1.5 orders of magnitude larger than Seq2seq model of 2014 (but about 2x smaller than GPT-J-6B in 2021). Google Translate's NMT system uses a large artificial neural network capable of deep learning. The new translation engine was first enabled for eight languages: to and from English and French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Turkish in November 2016. In March 2017, three additional languages were enabled: Russian, Hindi and Vietnamese along with Thai for which support was added later. Support for Hebrew and Arabic was also added with help from the Google Translate Community in the same month. In mid April 2017 Google Netherlands announced support for Dutch and other European languages related to English. Further support was added for nine Indian languages: Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Gujarati, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam and Kannada at the end of April 2017. By 2020, Google had changed methodology to use a different neural network system based on transformers, and had phased out NMT. == Evaluation ==

The GNMT system was said to represent an improvement over the former Google Translate in that it will be able to handle "zero-shot translation", that is it directly translates one language into another. For example, it might be trained just for Japanese-English and Korean-English translation, but can perform Japanese-Korean translation. The system appears to have learned to produce a language-independent intermediate representation of language (an "interlingua"), which allows it to perform zero-shot translation by converting from and to the interlingua. == Languages supported by GNMT ==

As of December 2021, all of the languages of Google Translate support GNMT, with Latin being the most recent addition. • Afrikaans • Albanian • Amharic • Arabic • Armenian • Azerbaijani • Basque • Belarusian • Bengali • Bosnian • Bulgarian • Burmese • Catalan • Cebuano • Chewa • Chinese (Simplified) • Chinese (Traditional) • Corsican • Croatian • Czech • Danish • Dutch • English • Esperanto • Estonian • Filipino (Tagalog) • Finnish • French • Galician • Georgian • German • Greek • Gujarati • Haitian Creole • Hausa • Hawaiian • Hebrew • Hindi • Hmong • Hungarian • Icelandic • Igbo • Indonesian • Irish • Italian • Japanese • Javanese • Kannada • Kazakh • Khmer • Kinyarwanda • Korean • Kurdish (Kurmanji) • Kyrgyz • Lao • Latin • Latvian • Lithuanian • Luxembourgish • Macedonian • Malagasy • Malay • Malayalam • Maltese • Maori • Marathi • Mongolian • Nepali • Norwegian (Bokmål) • Odia • Pashto • Persian • Polish • Portuguese • Punjabi (Gurmukhi) • Romanian • Russian • Samoan • Scottish Gaelic • Serbian • Shona • Sindhi • Sinhala • Slovak • Slovenian • Somali • Sotho • Spanish • Sundanese • Swahili • Swedish • Tajik • Tamil • Tatar • Telugu • Thai • Turkish • Turkmen • Ukrainian • Urdu • Uyghur • Uzbek • Vietnamese • Welsh • West Frisian • Xhosa • Yiddish • Yoruba • Zulu == See also ==