For years, Google Translate has been somewhat biased in identifying gender by linking jobs to a specific gender: a doctor with a male and a nurse with a female.
Yesterday, Google's AI team released a new model that will probably solve the problem. The new AI is already rolling out but provides support for gender translations from English to Spanish and from Finnish, Hungarian and Persian to English.
In a blog post, the company explained that its old approach it gave too much errorthe in the final results.
The team also reported that although using a neural engineering translation (Neural Machine Translation or simply NMT), the system could not translate the gender for more than 40% of the queries.
Left: An early example of translating a gender-neutral English phrase into a Spanish gender equivalent. In this case, only one example can be given that can be discriminated against. Right: The new Translation provides a choice of (female - male) gender.
To train AI, the team first used millions of sentences in English to create a basic model.
The researchers then trained it to display the female gender in a request requiring a male gender, and vice versa. Finally, the results from two directions merged to create a model that gives two options.
