Buzz Andersen

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Rather than trying to understand how languages actually worked, the system imbibed vast corpora of existing translations: parallel texts with the same content in different languages. It was the linguistic equivalent of Chris Anderson’s ‘end of theory’; pioneered by IBM in the 1990s, statistical language inference did away with domain knowledge in favour of huge quantities of raw data. Frederick Jelinek, the researcher who led IBM’s language efforts, famously stated that ‘every time I fire a linguist, the performance of the speech recogniser goes up’.21 The role of statistical inference was to ...more
New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future
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