<
https://www.techdirt.com/2023/04/27/how-refugee-applications-are-being-lost-in-machine-translation/>
"As you may have noticed, headlines are full of the wonders of chatbots and
generative AI these days. Although often presented as huge breakthroughs, in
many ways they build on machine learning techniques that have been around for
years. These older systems have been deployed in real-life situations for some
time, which means they provide valuable information about the possible pitfalls
of using AI for serious tasks. Here is a typical example of what has been
happening in the world of machine translation when applied to refugee
applications for asylum, as reported on the
Rest of the World site:
A crisis translator specializing in Afghan languages, Mirkhail was working
with a Pashto-speaking refugee who had fled Afghanistan. A U.S. court had
denied the refugee’s asylum bid because her written application didn’t match
the story told in the initial interviews.
In the interviews, the refugee had first maintained that she’d made it
through one particular event alone, but the written statement seemed to
reference other people with her at the time — a discrepancy large enough for
a judge to reject her asylum claim.
After Mirkhail went over the documents, she saw what had gone wrong: An
automated translation tool had swapped the “I” pronouns in the woman’s
statement to “we.”
That’s a tiny difference, and one that today’s machine translation programs can
easily miss, especially for languages where training materials are still
scarce. And yet the consequences of the shift from singular “I” to plural “we”
can have life-changing consequences – in the case above, whether asylum was
granted to a refugee fleeing Afghanistan."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
