group intelligence

I was just listening to a presentation titled “web search as a force for good” by Peter Norvig (director of search quality @ google) delivered at the web 2.0 conference.

Largely he talks about Google (duh). The interesting bit is when he talks about machine translation as visioned by the google boys.

Today, a large part of translation is done by word matching and some “basic” context sensitivity. (just try to take bigger chunks of written material in any language other then english and translate it… it will look funky after 1-2 sentences)

The approach that Peter talks about is not to translate every word specifically and then glue them together but to use the huge amount of data already indexed by google to get more sense into the translations.

So in effect, every non-english webpage with a “english version” is unknowingly providing to the future translation services of google. Interesting stuff.

Peter explains it with more clarity then i can. If interested you can listen to it here @ itconversations. The bit on translation is at the second half of it.