利用人工智能打开课程内容创作的瓶颈
Have you ever wondered how Duolingo figures out whether your answer counts as right or wrong? Let’s say you’re learning Portuguese and get “Eu tenho gatos demais” (literally I have cats too many) so you type “I have too many dogs.” You'll get a red ribbon and a sad Duo. How does Duolingo know? Although this example is pretty simple, deciding which translations should be accepted turns out to be a complex problem!
你有没有想过，Duolingo是如何计算出你的答案是对还是错的？比方说，你在学习葡萄牙语，得到 "Eu tenhogatosdemais"（字面意思是我有太多的猫），所以你输入 "我有太多的狗"。你会得到一条红丝带和一个悲伤的多。Duolingo是如何知道的？虽然这个例子很简单，但决定哪些翻译应该被接受，却变成了一个复杂的问题。
In this post, we’ll talk about why translation grading is so hard, and we'll report on a recent research project we organized to develop sophisticated artificial intelligence solutions to this problem.
在这篇文章中，我们将谈论为什么翻译分级如此困难，我们将报告我们最近组织的一个研究项目，以开发复杂的人工智能解决方案来解决这个问题。
How many ways can you say the same thing?
你有多少种方法可以说同样的事情？
Our method for grading is to compare each learner response against a list of acceptable translations curated by expert translators. You can see an example of all the English translations of a Portuguese sentence here:
我们的评分方法是将每个学习者的回答与专家翻译员策划的可接受的翻译列表进行比较。你可以在这里看到一个葡萄牙语句子的所有英文翻译的例子。
The number of translations can become huge depending on the length or complexity of the sentence. In one sentence in the English course for Chinese speakers – “Unfortunately, someone put my wool sweater in the dryer” – the number of Chinese translations reached over 6 billion! In that case, the many vocabulary options and possible word orders compounded to create this massive number. This can be a huge burden on our translators!
根据句子的长度或复杂性，翻译的数量可能会变得巨大。在针对中国人的英语课程中的一个句子--"不幸的是，有人把我的羊毛衫放在烘干机里"--中文翻译的数量达到了60多亿！在这种情况下，许多词汇选项和可能的词序复合在一起形成了这个庞大的数字。在这种情况下，许多词汇选项和可能的词序复合在一起，形成了这个庞大的数字。这对我们的译员来说可能是一个巨大的负担!
Not all sentences have this extreme number of translations, of course, but many still number in the hundreds. For humans, generating all of these translations is time-consuming, and it slows down course creation. If we could accelerate this proce...