
Multilingual Neural Machine Translation in the Wild - hardmaru
https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.05019
======
m0zg
People working on machine traslation need to figure out what is it that
[https://www.deepl.com/translator](https://www.deepl.com/translator) is doing,
and then do the same thing. All sorts of papers get presented claiming "state
of the art" results on translation, and meanwhile Deepl is sitting there in
the corner, smiling, and offering translation which is so much better than the
purported "state of the art" (and rather obviously so) it's not even funny.

~~~
junipertea
"People working on machine translation" also release their findings and
sometimes even code for the benefit of everyone.

~~~
m0zg
Yes, but this is one of those rare areas where the purported academic "state
of the art" is far below the _actual_ state of the art in the industry. Don't
get me wrong, I'm grateful that they're releasing results at all, and NLP has
gotten really exciting in the past couple of years thanks to those
publications. It's just that there seems to be a bit of a research bubble
going on and people are veering into ever more exotic and obscure problems
before they've achieved _actual_ SOTA result on even some of the most common
language pairs.

------
trevyn
(This is from the Google AI team.)

