Articles
Articles
Google’s Artificial-Intelligence Tool Is Offered for Free
by DANIELA HERNANDEZ @WSJ
Meet Parsey McParseface, a whimsically named computer program that helps machines understand written English.
Alphabet Inc. subsidiary Google is offering the code, and SyntaxNet—the software programming toolkit that it is part of—free for anyone to distribute or modify, according to a company blog post on Thursday.
“Our hope is that people will just use this instead of building their own,” said Dave Orr,SyntaxNet’s product manager. “They don’t have to reinvent the wheel.”
SyntaxNet is the latest among artificial-intelligence software systems to be released by large tech companies under an open-source license, which allows anyone to access, use and tweak the software. This week, Amazon.com Inc. made its Deep Scalable Sparse Tensor Network Engine available on the online code repository GitHub.
In November, Google released TensorFlow, its machine-learning code. Facebook Inc. has open-sourced both software and hardware systems for artificial intelligence.
[expand title=”More” notitle=”true”]SyntaxNet helps machines in breaking down sentences into their component parts of speech and in decoding the relationships between words and phrases. Its work is similar to the sentence-diagramming exercises taught in schools to teach grammar, but done at a faster pace.
Upon parsing sentences, Parsey McParseface can home in on the most relevant words, an analysis that complementary programs can use to perform searches and other tasks.
Google uses the program in several of its services, including search and Smart Reply, a feature that suggests quick email responses based on the content of received missives.
It also is used in filling Google’s Knowledge Graph, the repository of information upon which its search engine runs. The programmers, who worked on Parsey McParseface for roughly 18 months, had trouble thinking of an appropriate name. Someone volunteered the playful moniker—a play on Boaty McBoatface, a name chosen via public poll for a U.K. research ship earlier this year—and it stuck.
Experts believe that computers’ ability to understand natural language is crucial to improving technologies like virtual assistants, chatbots, software that places ads on Web pages, automated language translation, decision-support systems for professionals such as medical workers, and research tools that help scientists uncover relationships, for example, between a protein and a drug.
The hope is that language-driven applications will make such industries as retail, health care, research and sales more efficient.
Google claims that Parsey McParseface is the most accurate such program available.
It understands the relationships between words in a sentence with an accuracy of more than 94%, surpassing the previous record also held by Google. Human linguists employed by the company have an accuracy of roughly 95%, suggesting that the search giant’s software is nearing human-level performance.
‘Our hope is that people will just use this instead of building their own. They don’t have to reinvent the wheel.’
The Google system is only a first step, experts said. It can’t figure out relationships between sentences, a feature that would allow it to better understand overall context. It is only available in English. Longer sentences can stump Parsey McParseface. Using it to build a chatbot, for instance, would also require additional code and expertise. It is also unclear how well it will work out-of-the-box in specialized domains such as health care and biotech, experts said, which require large amounts of data representing a field’s particular vocabulary and its uses. If a program “learns” by analyzing news articles, as Parsey McParseface does, it may not be as good at reading and understanding medical texts.
“I would say this is in an incremental improvement. But there is nothing wrong with that,” said NLP expert Mihai Surdeanu of the University of Arizona. “Most science is incremental.”
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Ann Goldstein: A Star Italian Translator
By JENNIFER MALONEY @WSJ
One evening this past September, more than 300 people squeezed into a narrow room at BookCourt bookstore in Brooklyn for the launch of “The Story of the Lost Child,” by Italian author Elena Ferrante. The author, whose true identity is a closely held secret, was absent. Instead, the crowd whooped and cheered for the headliner of the evening: the book’s translator, Ann Goldstein.
Translators rarely achieve celebrity status. But as Ms. Ferrante’s star has risen, so too has Ms. Goldstein’s. Her English translations of the four books in Ms. Ferrante’s Neapolitan series have sold more than a million copies in North America, the U.K., Australia and New Zealand. Ms. Goldstein, 66 years old, is now one of the most sought-after translators of Italian literature. Last fall, she celebrated the completion of a gargantuan project: “The Complete Works of Primo Levi,” a 3,000-page collection for which she oversaw nine translators and translated three out of 14 books herself. This year, she expects to see the release of five of her translations, including “In Other Words,” a memoir by the American Pulitzer Prize-winner Jhumpa Lahiri, which Ms. Lahiri wrote in Italian. “Frantumaglia,” a collection of interviews and writings by Ms. Ferrante, will also be released this year.
Read an excerpt from “Frantumaglia.”
[expand title=”More” notitle=”true”]All of this comes on top of Ms. Goldstein’s day job, as head of the copy department at the New Yorker magazine.
She became a translator by accident, though it was clear from childhood that she had a deep affinity for languages.
She grew up in Maplewood, N.J., and began studying French and Latin in grade school. At Bennington College in Vermont, she took up ancient Greek, wanting to read Homer and Aeschylus. In 1973, she took her first job as a proofreader for Esquire. She moved to the New Yorker the following year, and worked her way up through the copy department, becoming its chief in the late 1980s. She has edited writers including John Updike, Ian Frazier and Adam Gopnik.
At the magazine, she earned a reputation as a master of English grammar who helped writers polish their sentences until they shined.
“She’s like a diamond cutter,” said New Yorker editor David Remnick. “It’s just an accumulation of refinement after refinement… that makes you a better you.”
She didn’t begin studying Italian—or even visit Italy—until her late 30s. In 1986, she and some of her New Yorker colleagues invited an Italian instructor to teach a class once a week at their office. Ms. Goldstein had always wanted to read Dante in the original language. Together, over the next couple of years, she and her colleagues read the entire “Divina Commedia.”
She visited Italy for the first time in 1987. Smitten with the language and the country, she began reading in Italian as much as she could.
In 1992, New Yorker cartoonist Saul Steinberg asked editor Robert Gottlieb to consider a short book by his friend, Italian author Aldo Buzzi. Mr. Gottlieb couldn’t read Italian, so he asked Ms. Goldstein to have a look at it. She read it, liked it, and decided to try her hand at translating it.
“I liked it as a way of reading,” Ms. Goldstein recalled in an interview at a cafe near her office at One World Trade Center. “If you have to copy down every word of something, you become very close to it.”
Mr. Gottlieb liked the translation, and published it in the magazine.
Ms. Goldstein continued to translate both magazine pieces and books. And in 2004, she got a big break. A new publishing company called Europa Editions invited her to submit a sample translation for its first book: Ms. Ferrante’s “The Days of Abandonment.” Ms. Goldstein submitted a sample of the book’s searing opening. So did Michael Reynolds, then a freelance copy editor for Europa, living in Rome.
Among the applicants, Ms. Goldstein wasn’t the best-known translator, but the editors decided her sample was the best. She beat out Mr. Reynolds, who later became editor in chief of the company, and now serves as her editor.
There is a spectrum, among translators, ranging from those who hew very closely to the original to those who take more liberties with the text. Ms. Goldstein leans toward fidelity. Editors who have worked with her say her strength comes not just from her mastery of Italian, but from her profound love of English.
“Sometimes, I think, it’s puzzle-solving,” Ms. Goldstein said. “I want to make good English sentences but without losing the particular voice of the Italian writer. I can’t explain how that happens. I think it has to do with staying pretty close to the original.”
Italian sentences tend to be more complex than English sentences, often running on with clauses and sub-clauses. Because English grammar doesn’t have gendered nouns, these clauses have to be rearranged to make sense in English. Ms. Ferrante’s sentences tumble forward, comma after comma, with emotional intensity. Ms. Goldstein’s translation replicates that rhythm, and that emotion.
In a December interview via email with FT Magazine, Ms. Ferrante said of Ms. Goldstein: “I trust her completely.”
Ms. Goldstein says she doesn’t know Ms. Ferrante’s real identity. She has exchanged emails with her a couple of times, but usually sends questions or clarifications through the author’s Italian editors. Ms. Ferrante reads English and signs off on the final versions but generally doesn’t suggest revisions, Mr. Reynolds said.
Ms. Goldstein said she was floored—and intimidated—when she was invited to translate Ms. Lahiri’s memoir. In a preface to the book, to be released Feb. 9 from Alfred A. Knopf, the author explains that she decided not to translate her own work because she wanted to immerse herself fully in Italian, and would have felt the urge to smooth out the “rough edges” of her adopted language.
Ms. Goldstein was immediately drawn to the book, in which the author recounts how she learned Italian as an adult, moved with her family to Rome and decided to write only in Italian. (One of Ms. Goldstein’s greatest regrets is never having lived in Italy—at least not yet.)
“Of course, it was also incredibly stressful,” Ms. Goldstein said of translating Ms. Lahiri’s book. “She’s a writer in English. I felt very anxious about it.”
Ms. Lahiri’s Italian is fairly simple in the book’s early chapters. The translation reflects how her syntax and vocabulary become more complex as the author becomes more confident in Italian. In contrast to Ms. Ferrante, Ms. Lahiri was closely involved in the translation. Ms. Goldstein said the author submitted at least three rounds of revisions to the translation, one of them after Ms. Lahiri recorded the audiobook in both English and Italian. Ms. Goldstein said she deferred to the author: “She had some stuff she wanted to change, which was fine.”
The intensity of their collaboration was unusual for Ms. Goldstein, who usually works with authors who are dead or, in Ms. Ferrante’s case, not present. Ms. Lahiri declined to comment for this article. The two women seem to have emerged from the project with their relationship intact: They appeared together in November at the Center for Fiction in New York, where they discussed the Ferrante novels.
In addition to the Ferrante interview collection coming in November, Europa Editions this year will publish Ms. Goldstein’s translations of “The Young Bride” by Alessandro Baricco and “The Street Kids” by Pier Paolo Pasolini. World Editions is slated to publish her translation of Emanuele Trevi’s “Something Written.”
Ferrante Fever began in earnest in the U.S. with the 2014 release of the third novel in the Neapolitan series. Ms. Goldstein was suddenly in demand as a stand-in for the enigmatic author at live events. Shy by nature, she has warmed to her role as an ambassador not just for the mysterious Ms. Ferrante but for translation in general. Translators are rarely named in book reviews. Their names often are left off book jackets. Ms. Goldstein’s name, however, has become a valuable commodity. On its website, Europa Editions touts “The Street Kids” as “a new translation by Ann Goldstein, translator of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels.”
“Her name on a book now is gold,” said Robert Weil, editor in chief of Liveright, who hired her for the Primo Levi project. Colleagues said Ms. Goldstein now stands among the ranks of great translators such as the late William Weaver, a doyen of Italian translation.
This spring, she has been invited to speak on a panel at the PEN World Voices Festival in New York and at writers’ festivals in Sydney and Auckland.
At the end of the night at BookCourt last September, the booksellers asked Ms. Goldstein to autograph their stock.
“I thought, ‘Who wants the translator’s signature?’” she said.
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Raytheon Company to showcase space mission expertise
DULLES, Va., April 11, 2016 /PRNewswire/ — Raytheon Company (NYSE: RTN) will showcase its capabilities across the space domain at the 32nd Space Symposium, the premier gathering of the global space community, held April 11-14 in Colorado Springs, Colorado.
From space flight training and launch range management to advanced, space-based earth monitoring, satellite ground control and data analytics, Raytheon offers advanced technology and services across the space value chain.
[expand title=”More” notitle=”true”]The Raytheon booth (#233) will feature an interactive visualization of the Raytheon space value chain:
Cybersecurity
As a proven leader in advanced cyber threat protection, Raytheon utilizes deployed tools for the detection and mitigation of attacks.
Training support
Raytheon operates and maintains facilities critical for human spaceflight 24/7, running real-time mission scenarios that help International Space Station astronauts deal with spaceflight challenges.
Positioning, Navigation & Timing
Raytheon is a leader in modernizing Positioning, Navigation and Timing for both GPS command and controls and for a variety of Air Traffic Management and precision weapons capabilities.
Space launch
Providing operations, maintenance and sustainment for safe, effective and efficient launch, testing and tracking of Department of Defense, civil, commercial and international spacelift vehicles.
Earth monitoring
With a 50-year history of successful on-orbit performance, Raytheon space sensors provide landmark observations of Earth foradvanced weather forecasting, natural resources management, missile warning, defense and intelligence missions and a wide range of commercial applications.
Mission management
Spanning the Tasking, Collection, Processing, Exploitation and Dissemination lifecycle with solutions, capabilities and operational support for managing tasking, schedules and execution across a wide range of platform, sensor and ground assets.
Analytics
Raytheon is among the first movers at every point across the data value stream, providing deep experience and innovative thinking for space data analytics. We integrate analytics into our customer’s missions to give them decision advantage. Analytics site.
Mission Support
Demonstrated record of sustaining and modernizing mission critical systems and infrastructure. Supporting high-consequence missions, providing unambiguous warning and attack assessment systems for air, missile and space threats.
Data Dissemination
Delivering actionable information, Raytheon puts meaningful data into the hands of users through mobile, and individual and collaborative tools used by analysts, war fighters and other end users. Analytics site
About Raytheon
Raytheon Company, with 2015 sales of $23 billion and 61,000 employees, is a technology and innovation leader specializing in defense, civil government and cybersecurity solutions. With a history of innovation spanning 94 years, Raytheon provides state-of-the-art electronics, mission systems integration, C5ITM products and services, sensing, effects, and mission support for customers in more than 80 countries. Raytheon is headquartered in Waltham, Mass. Visit us at www.raytheon.com and follow us on Twitter @Raytheon.
Media Contacts
Rachael Duffy
571.250.1517
Rachael.L.Duffy@raytheon.com
John Barksdale
310.658.9547
John_Barksdale@raytheon.com
SOURCE Raytheon Company
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