How Big Data And Machine Translation Combine To Fight COVID-19

Blog #3

Ariel Sonbay

D0731711

website :  https://www.smartdatacollective.com/how-big-data-and-machine-translation-combine-to-fight-covid-19/

Machine Translation using Big Data by the Leading Corporations

With the problem that are happening now,  translation services are really bearing to the efficiencies and throughput of machine translation. There are simply not enough human translators and interpreters to go around. 

Luckily, thanks to the improvement of neural network methodologies in the last decade, the quality of machine translation has dramatically increased, the development take over by biggest tech companies in this area, as known by the acronym FAMGA : Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon. Every corporations in their own way has relied on big data to compete on the leading linguistic edge. Instead of chomping numbers, they’re chomping words.

Social Media Translation and Privacy Challenges in COVID Tracking

Facebook won first place in several categories of the 2019 WMT competition, influencing large-scale tested back-translation, a big data technique based on Neural Machine Translation, demanding great amounts of bilingual training data – sentences for which reference translations are available. Bilingual data is hard to acquire, so the Facebook team used back-translation as a solution. eventually, the team uses around 10 billion words of additional data for its task. Facebook has supreme access to content, using the comments and posts of its 2 billion or so users as training material.

It’s one thing to use published language for experimental purposes in a language competition. It’s another altogether to feat member posts on sensitive health matters like the novel coronavirus and the COVID-19 pandemic. As a J. Scott Marcus of the Bruegel Institute has observed, users “volunteer” information in different and many ways: in their posts to social media, in their use of mobile services and providing location data, in seeking health information. 

Translating Privacy Concerns in Connection with Voluntary Data Collected

Citizens may not be aware that the provision of “voluntary” data would be used to track them down and possibly quarantine them or tracking their movements. More than a country – starting with China, then South Korea, Taiwan, Israel, and others have explicitly used some or all of this information. In general, high tech companies have cooperated with national governments in making their data available, although privacy protections such as GPRS in Europe have discouraged such uses in the European Union.

Public uses of Machine Translation and Interpretation on a Massive Scale

Another example of the massive application of machine translation has been for testing visitors at international airports. In addition to thermal imagine and the now universal “thermometer pistols”, border officials are using hand-held voice-interpreters to ask arriving passengers about their travel histories or medical symptoms.

The same considerations hold true for informing sectors of the public which do not speak the dominant language. Providing current information about coronavirus is a problem for migrants who do not speak the mother language of the country. In the Netherlands, according to a VOA report, volunteers set up a health desk to help new immigrants who don’t speak Dutch. In Australia, the government sponsors a massive translation program at the nation’s border. Translating and Interpreting Service (TIS National) is a service provided by the Department of Immigration and Border Protection for non-English speakers who use both human translator and machine translation.

The need is massive in US hospitals. The New York Times stated in April 2020 on the vast scale of the difficulties of Hispanic sufferers of COVID-19 in the United States, suffering extremely, representing some 34% of casualties from the disease in New York.  To cope with the demand, New York hospitals are increasingly turning to video remote interpretation, where health care providers call in to services where an interpreter is available on demand.

I think machine translation is very needed in the problem that world has faced now, which is COVID-19. Machine translator can assist more efficient and faster than human translator could.