Statistical machine translation live

Posted by Franz Och, Research Scientist

Because we want to provide everyone with access to all the world's information, including information written in every language, one of the exciting projects at Google Research is machine translation. Most state-of-the-art commercial machine translation systems in use today have been developed using a rules-based approach and require a lot of work by linguists to define vocabularies and grammars.

Several research systems, including ours, take a different approach: we feed the computer with billions of words of text, both monolingual text in the target language, and aligned text consisting of examples of human translations between the languages. We then apply statistical learning techniques to build a translation model. We have achieved very good results in research evaluations.

Now you can see the results for yourself. We recently launched an online version of our system for Arabic-English and English-Arabic. Try it out! Arabic is a very challenging language to translate to and from: it requires long-distance reordering of words and has a very rich morphology. Our system works better for some types of text (e.g. news) than for others (e.g. novels) -- and you probably should not try to translate poetry ... but do stay tuned for more exciting developments.

Update: We've just opened a discussion forum for all topics related to machine translation.

Update: Fixed broken link to NIST results.

Our conference on automated testing

Posted by Allen Hutchison, Engineering Manager

Automated testing is one of my passions: it has hard problems to be solved, and they get harder every day. Over the past few years, I've had the opportunity to work on several automation projects, and now I'm getting a chance to combine my passion for automation with my love for the city of London.

I'm happy to announce that Google will be hosting a Conference on Test Automation in our London office on September 7 and 8, 2006. Our goal is to create a collegial atmosphere where participants can discuss challenges facing people on the cutting edge of test automation, and evaluate solutions for meeting those challenges.

Call for Presentations
We're looking for speakers with exciting ideas and new approaches to test automation. If you have a subject you'd like to talk about, please send me email at londontestconf@google.com that includes a description of your 60- or 90-minute talk in 500 words or less. Deadline for submissions is June 1.

We're planning to have 10 people give presentations at the conference followed by adequate time for discussion. If you'd like to attend as a non-speaker, watch this space. Once we've got a slate of speakers, we'll post it along with details on attending.

See you at CHI

Posted by Rick Boardman, User Experience Researcher

The raison d’etre for our user experience research team is driven by Google's keen interest in focusing on the user. So we help many product teams provide the best possible experience to everyone around the world, primarily by inviting thousands of people to take part in usability tests in our labs, and by analyzing our logs to identify problems which need fixing. From this we get the data we help our engineers make Google products as easy as possible to use for the millions of people out there who think computers are far too complicated. People like my Mum, Dad, girlfriend, Gran — and pretty much everyone I know!

We’re one of several Google teams that publish research at academic and industry conferences, and this week a number of us will be attending the CHI (Computer-Human Interaction) conference in Montreal, the world's premiere gathering for CHI researchers and practitioners. Googlers from several teams will take part in eight sessions, each focusing on different aspects of human-computer interaction. (The full program is here – it’s a PDF file.)

A Large Scale Study of Wireless Search Behavior: Google Mobile Search – In a session on Search and Navigation: Mobiles and Audio, we'll present the first large-scale study of search behavior for mobile users, highlighting some shortcomings of wireless search interfaces.

Scaling the card sort method to over 500 items: Restructuring the Google AdWords Help Center – Here we adapt the popular card-sorting research methodology to large information sets where the traditional approach is impractical and discuss how we've applied this technique.

No IM Please, We’re Testing – During the Usability Evaluations: Challenges and Solutions session we’ll discuss the use of instant messaging tools like Google Talk in usability tests, and the benefits of this technique for enabling live collaboration between test moderators and observers.

Add a Dash of Interface: Taking Mash-Ups to the Next Level – Here we contribute to the discussion of how extendable interfaces like Google Maps are enabling exciting new online innovation through the combining of data sources.

Why Do Tagging Systems Work? – This panel will address the design challenges of scaling tagging systems to meet their recent surge in popularity. Gmail is an example of email tagging that offers more flexibility than traditional hierarchical systems.

Design Communication: How Do You Get Your Point Across? – A key challenge for UI designers is communicating solutions and challenges within product teams. This panel focuses on effective ways to do that.

“It’s About the Information, Stupid!” Why We Need a Separate Field of Human Information Interaction – This interdisciplinary panel will discuss arguments for and against a distinct field focusing on information rather than computing technology. One for the theoreticians? (-;

Incorporating Eyetracking into User Studies at Google – In this Eyetracking in Practice workshop, we’ll talk about some of the challenges we’ve encountered in studies of eyetracking in our labs.

If you work in, or study, the area of human-computer interaction, the user experience team is hiring. Right now we’re looking for user experience researchers (including those with specialized quantitative skills), UI designers, and more.