tech:

taffy

Microsoft says it has created machine translation that can work as well as humans

Story on Voice Recognition at Microsoft of Fil & XD on November 24, 2015. (Photography by Scott Eklund/Red Box Pictures)

Microsoft researchers said Wednesday that they believe they have created a machine translation system that can translate sentences of news articles from Chinese to English, as well as a person.

The company says the results were verified by external bilingual human evaluators, who compared Microsoft’s results to two independently produced human reference translations. Researchers in the company’s Asia and U.S. labs said that their system achieved human parity on a commonly used test set of news stories, called newstest2017.

According to Xuedong Huang, a technical fellow in charge of Microsoft’s speech, natural language and machine translation efforts, “Hitting human parity in a machine translation task is a dream that all of us have had. We just didn’t realize we’d be able to hit it so soon.”

[Image: Scott Eklund/Red Box Pictures | Image courtesy: Microsoft]

Just in

Windows 11 Start menu ads are now rolling out to everyone — The Verge

Microsoft is starting to enable ads inside the Start menu on Windows 11 for all users, writes Tom Warren. 

Biden signs TikTok ‘ban’ bill into law, starting the clock for ByteDance to divest it — The Verge

President Joe Biden signed a foreign aid package that includes a bill that would ban TikTok if China-based parent company ByteDance fails to divest the app within a year, writes Lauren Feiner.

IBM to acquire HashiCorp for $6.4B

IBM and HashiCorp have entered into an agreement for IBM to acquire HashiCorp, a provider of infrastructure and security management products, for $6.4 billion.

Oracle is moving its world headquarters to Nashville to be closer to health-care industry — CNBC

Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison said Tuesday that the company is moving its world headquarters to Nashville, Tennessee, to be closer to a major health-care epicenter, writes Ashley Capoot.