
Bing Translates “Daesh” as “Saudi Arabia”, Angers Entire Kingdom - petehosey
http://basirat.ir/en/news/944/bing-translates-%E2%80%9Cdaesh%E2%80%9D-as-%E2%80%9Csaudi-arabia%E2%80%9D-angers-entire-kingdom
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Ar-Curunir
Unintentionally accurate.

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fleitz
Algorithms discover what many of us have known for a while.

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sriram_sun
Now an entire kingdom knows about bing! Genius!

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idbehold
I would assume that a translation service would essentially act as a key/value
store for individual words entered without any other context, so how did this
mistakenly happen?

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fleitz
It's not a mistake. The algorithm puts words that mean similar things into the
same bin.

So if say ISIS beheads people and SA beheads people then the algo will think
they are the same, if people in SA throw gays off rooftops and ISIS does the
same, then the algos think it's the same.

Algos are just statistical inference engines, they don't know you're not
supposed to say certain things. It's kind of like when kids say something
hilarious that no adult would say because the adult is supposed to know
better.

SA is only pissed off because it's so close to the truth, like if bing
translated Daesh to Norway no one would care because the comparison is
ridiculous.

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hiddencost
Practically speaking, it's much more likely that the parallel text had too
many misalignments; the explanation you provide is probably at best a minor
effect, there are way too many other factors at play to believe that's
necessarily the one. Trying to moralize based on a result like this is
dangerous.

A cool way to maybe provide some evidence that might support your point would
be to train a word embedding that compressed the names of entities into a
single token, and then demonstrate that SA and ISIS were close in some
meaningful sense.

