New Year's Madness?

Seeing the traffic and the hustle and bustle at the end of the year in our cities can get one wondering about the meaning of a new year. Why does the whole world celebrate the New Year? Why is the end of December such a special turning point? Is this demarcation not rather arbitrary compared with other celebrations? The meaning of New Year’s is not as clear as that of Christmas, for example (good will to all), or Independence Day. Are the celebrations completely vacuous, or do they have a deep psychological significance for people around the globe?

In ancient times people welcomed the New Year with rituals meant to attract good fortune. The Ancient Romans caroused in the streets for several days, around food-laden tables. The Ancient Babylonians, Hindus, Chinese, and Celts sought to restore order after chaos at the turn of the year. Until now, starting fresh is a common concept in many cultures.

The month of January is actually named after the Roman god Janus, the god of gates, doorways and thresholds: a two-faced god with faces looking in opposite directions representing the past and the future. No wonder then that at the end of the year, people reflect on past achievements and plan for a brighter year ahead. Whether people reflect deeply about their values is not always reflected in the resolutions they proclaim. Around the world there are resounding, common themes: people want to be healthier, to exercise more and smoke less, to be more active members of their communities, to be more productive at work, etc. Psychologically, people want to improve themselves and their lives in general.

While there is nothing wrong with recalling one’s values and wanting to advance, the question remains as to why only now? Isn’t December the thirty first, technically speaking, the same as any other day of the year? Why not remember our values daily, throughout the year? Why not seek improvement all year around, regularly reflecting on our successes and failures, our goals for the future?

The point here is not to belittle New Year’s celebrations, although they can be extravagant in proportion to the real significance of the New Year, nor is it to undermine new years’ resolutions. The point is that one can sympathize with those who laugh at the crowds flooding the gyms in January, who dwindle out of sight in February, and one can understand those who decide not to celebrate at all.

Breaking Language Barriers

                                                   
Your voice in language 1 – MachineTranslation - Your voice in language 2

Last May I blogged about the ways in which natural language processing is changing our world, mentioning a number of applications, including automatic machine translation of speech using one’s own voice. I wrote that computer speech synthesis had advanced to an extent that, in the near future, systems would be able to translate your speech using your own voice. Theoretically speaking, you would be able to hear your voice speaking a foreign language without your necessarily having learnt that language. With sufficient samples of your speech, such systems would be capable of putting together new sentences for you, in the new language. The systems would just need to know your voice, and they would do the rest of the work.

Well, that future is here now. Rick Rashid, Microsoft’s Chief Research Officer, has recently demonstrated automatic translation of his English speech into Chinese at Microsoft Research Asia’s 21st Century Computing event. One of his blog posts includes a recent video of his demonstration, entitled “Speech Recognition Breakthrough for the Spoken, Translated Word”. In that post, he explains that the first challenge in such systems is for the computer to actually understand what you are saying – a challenge acknowledged by experts decades ago; the past decade has seen breakthroughs reflected in a “combination of better methods, faster computers and the ability to process dramatically more data” (“Microsoft Research Shows a Promising New Breakthrough in Speech Translation Technology”).

Rashid adds that over two years ago Microsoft researchers made their systems far more intelligent by using a technique called Deep Neural Networks that simulates the way the human brain works. He asserts that error rates in speech recognition have been reduced from around one in five words to about one in eight, and that, similarly, machine translation has become more reliable. In the case of English to Chinese, the system works in two steps: first, it translates the English words into Chinese equivalents; then, it re-arranges the words to form proper Chinese sentences. While acknowledging the persistence of errors, including amusing ones, in both the English text and the translation, he projects that, in a few more years, these systems will be astonishingly reliable.

This is definitely breaking news on breaking language barriers. The implications for academic institutions might warrant some consideration.