Peter Norvig, the director of research at Google, presented last week the company's newest innovations and the future of data analysis.

He first spoke about the Statistical Machine Translation, a translation software currently under development. The goal of this program is to improve the translation's accuracy (we guessed that), and to make it more human. Indeed, the current Google Translate is not perfect at all.

A translation software is really a good example of how the ability to utilize large amounts of data is helping to expand the resources available to everyone.
To summarize, it means that with all the google's services...

• classical search on Internet (google search);
• search on blogs (blogger or google blogsearch);
  
• search in the press (google news);
  
• search in the books (google books);
  
• search in academic articles (google scholar);

... google can create an algorithm that learns grammar and syntax, and can use it for others services, as the translation.

Norvig also spoke about others projects on the same principle, as the improvment of google sets, that provides 5 keywords related to one keyword, or a new application that can show the trend graphs that track the volume of different searches at different times of the year (a little bit like google trends, finally...)



Source: The Daily Californian, last week.

For those who do not know:
- google books, google scholar ... at least two services that are 99,9% non-spam certified, i.e. without data that fools the reader. A perfect content for this subject.
- two new options recently appear in google translate: Arabic-English and English-Arabic. They use the prototype of this Statistical Machine Translation. Here are test results.