
Google applying to patent deep neural network (LSTM) for machine translation - shmageggy
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/y2016/0117316.html
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osterbit2
"Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it
universally accessible and useful"

(didn't dig too far into this but..) why y'all need to patent this then?

Patents can be beneficial to facilitate constructive competition, but think
humanity is best served by neural nets becoming the new electricity rather
than the new Apple-esque walled-garden...

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jagtodeath
I'd rather google patent them than some other sue-happy company who will abuse
them. Who knows, maybe they will open source the patent.

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gknoy
I felt similarly about Sun, but then Oracle bought them.

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TearsInTheRain
Google has the largest market cap so that isnt a concern here

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misterbwong
Google has the largest market cap _right now_ so that isnt a concern here
_yet_

FTFY

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jkrause314
Clickbait.

This is a patent on a very particular form of translation model that handles
rare words, i.e. this paper that all the authors are on:
[http://arxiv.org/abs/1410.8206](http://arxiv.org/abs/1410.8206)

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PeterisP
Doesn't this very paper invalidate this patent, since its publication precedes
the filing, and makes the method permanently unpatentable ?

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elsewhen
there is a one year grace period after public disclosure to actually file for
a patent:

[http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/s2133.html](http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/s2133.html)

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cgy1
Also the patent application claims priority to a provisional patent
application filed October 24, 2014, which was in all likelihood filed in view
of the paper being submitted on October 30, 2014.

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VonGuard
Google is patenting this so that if they get sued, they already have a patent.
If they actually sue anyone over this FIRST, I'd be shocked. This has got to
be a defensive patent, in case someone else was about to patent the same thing
and run after them with a lawyer.

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spacemanmatt
Hard to see how it's not another pure-software patent.

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transpy
They include a function to identify and map source/target unknown ('rare')
words.

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YeGoblynQueenne
Oh, and I was wondering what exactly they use in Google Translate.

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tomwrenn
:(

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mistermaster
they will have to pay royalties to Sepp Hochreiter, the inventor of LSTM
([http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=679596...](http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6795963&url=http%3A%2F%2Fieeexplore.ieee.org%2Fxpls%2Fabs_all.jsp%3Farnumber%3D6795963))

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PeterisP
Why? LSTM as such isn't patented, so the concept is free to use by anyone
without any restrictions or royalties, no matter who invented it.

Also, the concept of LSTM wouldn't be patentable directly even in the current
liberal software patent interpretation, you might patent _particular
applications_ of LSTM (e.g. this patent) but not _any and all arbitrary_
applications of LSTM.

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Cshelton
I'm not a patent attorney or anything, but...how could this ever be
enforceable...?

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therobot24
i'm sure the cost for trying (bit of cash) is greatly outweighed by the
benefits of successfully being awarded the patent

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amelius
What are the benefits if you can't enforce it?

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dudus
To defend yourself against patent trolls

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rst
Nope. If Google being sued by someone else with a similar business, having
patents of their own might help with a countersuit -- Google would allege that
PlaintiffX was infringing Google's patents in the course of its own business.
But a pure patent troll doesn't operate any business at all (other than
collecting license fees), so they can't infringe somebody else's patents in
the course of doing the nothing that they do.

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transpy
Why is Google patenting this tech? It's cutting-edge machine translation. The
rest of the industry is still talking about statistical machine translation.
The sector is moving very fast. With the recent SyntaxNet release and neural
machine translation, Google is approaching the dream: universal automatic
translation, which, by the way, is an innovation goal of Obama's
administration.

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astrodust
Quick, someone patent using artificial intelligence to generate patentable
ideas!

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transpy
I can't affirm I know about patents, or why some company files a patent. I
understand one or two things about translation technology though, and I'm
trying to express why I think this is valuable for Google in the context of
industrial translation.

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mooneater
Independent claim #1 does not mention neural networks at all. So its an
application to patent more broadly than the title suggests.

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transpy
Neural network(s) is mentioned 55 times in the claims.

