SOGO Secured Double Champions for Two-Way AI Translation Competitions on WMT 2018

The huge wave of artificial intelligence is now on its way, and is in a full swing in some places. Everybody seems to be aware that the one who wins on artificial intelligence is going to win everything. However, how to present a powerful and reliable AI product to lead the next era of artificial intelligence is an important goal for all Internet technology enterprises in the world.

Phonetic / voice translation is undoubtedly a good point of breakthrough. With the support of deep learning algorithms, AI makes machine learning "smarter" enough to break down the barriers of languages and cultures. In this aspect, it seems some of China's high-tech companies have taken the lead. With its accumulated advantages in voice technologies, SOGO ZHIYIN won the title of Chinese-English and English-Chinese translation in the WMT 2018 international evaluation a few days ago. The accuracy and speed of their machine translation shocked the whole industry.

The WMT2018 conference, held in the Copenhagen on September 7 and 8, is the most authoritative international evaluation competition for language technologies in the world. WMT, formally known as Workshop on Machine Translation, is one of the internationally recognized top Machine Translation competitions jointly organized by researchers from universities and research institutions in Europe and the United States.

This year's WMT2018 translation competition features the participation of more than 20 internationally renowned institutions, such as Johns Hopkins university, the university of Edinburgh, Canada's NRC, Oregon state university, the university of Rochester, Uppsala University, and the U.S. air force research laboratory. In China, the machine translation team of SOGO voice interaction technology center, Xiamen University, institute of computing, Chinese academy of sciences and others attended the conference.

From 2006 to 2018, WMT had held 12 machine translation competitions, each of which represents the competition of the world's most advanced level of translation. With the development of machine translation technology, the position of traditional translation industry has been seriously challenged. Manual evaluation is the main index of translation evaluation. The 0-100 percentile system indicates the quality of translation results. The standardized human score is obtained by standardizing the human score of each sentence in the translation results. Finally, standardized artificial scores are used as the basis for the final ranking.

After some intense competitions, WMT officially announced its results on September 8th: the Chinese-English and English-Chinese systems submitted by SOGO voice interaction technology center -- machine translation team won the first place of manual evaluation index in both directions! Meanwhile, among the 20 submitted systems, the English-Chinese translation system submitted by SOGO voice interaction technology center won the first place in seven of the eight machine Evaluation indexes and the first place in BLEU(Bilingual Evaluation Understudy), the main machine index. Undoubtedly, this means that China's voice translation technology has stepped into the forefront of the world's top field.

When speech recognition meets Chinese-English translation, practicality translates into the primary productivity. Voice technology is the main port of human-computer interaction. In the face of the development tide of artificial intelligence, how to make the intelligent voice technology that only stays in the laboratory realize better popularization and application has become the key to determine the fate of the market for various products. Since 2012, the size of the global intelligent voice industry has been on a sustained and rapid growth trend, according to the institute of electronic technology information and intelligence under the ministry of industry and information technology. In 2013, the overall size of the global intelligent voice industry reached $3.37 billion, up 38.1% year on year. In 2014, the year-on-year growth was 41.0% compared with 2013. The global smart voice market is expected to reach $11.24 billion by 2018.

Language recognition and translation, has been born out of mature machine products, with explosive artificial intelligence industry value. As early as the 3rd world Internet conference in November 2016, SOGO showed once the simultaneous translation technology of voice, and dozens of machine simultaneous transmission demonstrations, realizing the sensational effect of "simultaneous presentation of English translation while making a speech in Chinese".

For the development of artificial intelligence, "practical applicability" has always been the most critical measure. In addition to the simultaneous interpretation of SOGO in this WMT competition, various artificial intelligence technologies represented by SOGO machine translation have also been applied to the products. Since the launch of the SOGO input method voice translation function, the average daily P.V. has reached 2 million. The perfect combination of voice and translation has been widely welcomed by users. WMT 2018's Chinese and English translation double champion enables SOGO to show the voice real-time translation technology advantage that makes the industry amazing, and also obtains the competitive pressure that attracts much attention.