Page 11 - ELG2003 Mar Issue 469

El•Gazette 469.qxp_El•Gazette 469 25/02/2020 21:50 Page 11

NEWS

How learning Chinese improved Ernie’s English

By Gillian Ragsdale As language teachers well
know, understanding the meaning PIXABAY
A Chinese Artificial intelligence of language requires a lot more
(AI) platform has improved AI than understanding the meaning
understanding of both Chinese of individual words, and this has
and English, reports Yu Sun and been a major challenge for AI
colleagues from Baidu Inc., Beijing. systems.
Up to now, the race to develop One way that BERT trained to
AI that can understand and use understand language was by
natural human language has been hiding some words, then trying to
dominated by the US tech giants predict what they would be by
Google, Microsoft and Facebook looking at the words before and
– so the human language under after the missing word, a kind of
focus has been English. word gap activity.
This international competition When ERNIE wanted to do the
has a fast-changing leaderboard, same it had to adapt the technique
reporting scores on GLUE to Chinese. Individual Chinese
(General Language characters don’t carry meaning in ERNIE and BERT are named after Sesame Street characters
Understanding), a set of tasks the way English words do. The
developed to test how well an AI meaning of individual Chinese as ‘call it a day’. English language REFERENCE
really understands language. An characters depends on adjacent teachers may be surprised at the n Sun, Y. et al. (2019) ‘ERNIE
average human scores 87/100 and characters. So, ERNIE trained by techies’ surprise: perhaps more of 2.0: A Continual Pre-Training
Google’s BERT (Bidirectional hiding strings of characters so that us should consult on these Framework for Language
Encoder Representation from it learned the meaning of pairs and projects. Understanding.’ Preprint for
Transformers) was the first AI to groups of characters rather than GLUE scores are now so high AAAI-20 (Association for the
pass this milestone. individual ones. that a new, tougher test is being Advancement of Artificial
Then last December, China’s This turned out to greatly used. SuperGLUE includes Intelligence 2020 Conference,
ERNIE (Enhanced Representa- improve ERNIE’s ability to complex open questions such as, New York, USA).
tion through kNowledge intEgra- understand English, too – because ‘How do jellyfish function without https://arxiv.org/pdf/1907.
tion) became the first to score over pairs and groups of English words a brain?’. 12412.pdf
90, topping its US competitors. also carry meaning that you
ERNIE, from Chinese Google- cannot infer from the individual
type giant, Baidu, built on BERT’s words alone, such as, ‘Harry
improvements – but with a twist. Potter’ and common idioms such

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