Zero-Shot Translation with Multilingual Neural Machine Translation System
This reminds me of Searle&#x27;s Chinese Room Argument[0]: imagine you have a particularly dreary job where you sit in a room filled with boxes of symbols written on paper. Every now and again someone comes in and hands you some new symbols. You look through your rulebook and, depending on what it says, hand them some symbols back. It turns out that these rules actually implement a conversational program in Chinese. And if you can implement those rules and not understand Chinese, why would you think a computer program, implementing its own rules, could understand anything?<p>The common &quot;Systems Reply&quot; response to this is that you&#x27;re looking at the wrong layer of abstraction. The computer hardware (or the person in the room) doesn&#x27;t understand Chinese, the computer plus the rules plus the data <i>forms a system that understands Chinese</i>. Searle&#x27;s answer to this is that, well, what if you memorised the rules and the database? You might know all the rules, you might be able to follow them, but you wouldn&#x27;t understand Chinese.<p>What I think is fascinating about this is that it&#x27;s vulnerable to Bayesian Judo[1]: if you have a strong belief that computers aren&#x27;t capable of true understanding because of the Chinese Room Argument, then building an actual Chinese Room-style computer and having it show understanding should be a fairly strong blow to that belief.<p>Now, it&#x27;s easy to quibble about what true understanding actually means, but one version (used by Searle&#x27;s answer) is this: &quot;[..] he would not know the meaning of the Chinese word for hamburger. He still cannot get semantics from syntax.&quot; But this news is exactly that! A computer translation of the same semantic concept from one syntax to another <i>without ever having been taught the rules connecting them</i>. In other words, this is semantics from syntax implemented by nothing but a computer, a database, and a set of rules.<p>So, by the reverse Chinese Room Argument, I would say this system exhibits a kind of understanding. Not a very sophisticated kind, mind you, but something that should still spook you if you believe computers are categorically incapable of thinking like us.<p>[0] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;plato.stanford.edu&#x2F;entries&#x2F;chinese-room&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;plato.stanford.edu&#x2F;entries&#x2F;chinese-room&#x2F;</a>
[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;lesswrong.com&#x2F;lw&#x2F;i5&#x2F;bayesian_judo&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;lesswrong.com&#x2F;lw&#x2F;i5&#x2F;bayesian_judo&#x2F;</a>