快猫短视频

IF YOU are puzzled when the German waiter asks you: 鈥淲as m枚chten Sie?鈥�
all you have to do is to reach for your mobile phone. Not only will the phone
tell you that the waiter is asking you what you want, it will even translate
your order into German.

The system, called Verbmobil, can translate spoken English, German, Japanese
and Chinese almost instantaneously. It operates over a standard mobile phone
network鈥攜ou just dial a number. Verbmobil, the product of a
$90-million research programme, was demonstrated in Seattle last
week.

鈥淚t鈥檚 90 per cent accurate,鈥� says Wolfgang Wahlster from the artificial
intelligence research institute DFKI in Saarbr眉cken, Germany. 鈥淲e have
checked it against 25,000 translation tasks.鈥� It is also quick. The delay in
translation is no more than a few milliseconds.

Text-based translators, like AltaVista鈥檚 Babelfish, have existed for some
time. But their translations are often poor. The problem is even more difficult
with spoken language, partly because of background noise and also because people
use ungrammatical sentences.

Unlike other translators, Verbmobil doesn鈥檛 try to filter out background
noise, which can cause some of the message to disappear. 鈥淭he secret is we don鈥檛
transform the original signal to get rid of this garbage noise,鈥� says Wahlster.
Instead Verbmobil tries to make sense out of the noise鈥攄iscarding any
words that don鈥檛 fit.

Although Verbmobil is still imperfect, people are better at coping with
errors in spoken language than in print, says Wahlster. They hear the errors but
understand the basic gist, as if someone were speaking a pidgin language.