I'm not exactly a Facebook fan but the blame for this needs to be shared by the Israeli police.
Facebook apologizes after wrong translation sees Palestinian man arrested
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Re: Facebook apologizes after wrong translation sees Palestinian man arrested
#32Given how ridiculously common the phrase "Good morning" is in Arabic, (I mean, look at any Arabic 101 textbook, the Sabah Al-khair / Sabah al-noor exchange is one of the first things they teach you), it's puzzling why Facebook's translation algorithm didn't see that as a fixed phrase, rather than trying to translate it word by word. So much for machine learning.
Most sources for machine translation from Arabic-English pairs are data from US Army / anti-terrorist data.
So the data are learned to translate terrorist messages very well, as well as army terms. However, it doesn't translate day-to-day use that well.
Machine learning is only as good as the source data - and Arabic-English language pair specifically has data from US military complex, that loves translating terrorist messages. So translating Al Qaeda messaging will be good, translating regular message boards will be worse. The machine learns to translate everything as an attack, since that is what it knows.
(I cannot give you exact sources, but I knew people from inside Google. Facebook uses Bing, but I think the data sources will be similar.)
Re: Facebook apologizes after wrong translation sees Palestinian man arrested
#33The predator will not eat a bad tasting butterfly, but we can trick it to do so. They talk about a "linguistic translation" error in the attempt to deflect focus away from the meta data triggers that this person generated. Cyber phrenology is real. https://www.cultstate.com/2017/10/13/The-Butterfly-War/
Are you implying this was part of some cyber-phrenological attack to poison the "predator"? Or something? Pardon my ignorance, as my attempts to understand just what the hell cyber phrenology is all about is a bit stymied by the fact that this theory reads like a William Gibson novel...
Re: Facebook apologizes after wrong translation sees Palestinian man arrested
#34The fact that you can get arrested for a Facebook post in Israel is already alarming.
In what country can you never be arrested for a Facebook post?
Re: Facebook apologizes after wrong translation sees Palestinian man arrested
#35Given how ridiculously common the phrase "Good morning" is in Arabic, (I mean, look at any Arabic 101 textbook, the Sabah Al-khair / Sabah al-noor exchange is one of the first things they teach you), it's puzzling why Facebook's translation algorithm didn't see that as a fixed phrase, rather than trying to translate it word by word. So much for machine learning.
It's not that uncommon, algorithms make a lot of mistakes and this is becoming a critical issue as more and more of our life is ruled by algorithms.
Re: Facebook apologizes after wrong translation sees Palestinian man arrested
#36The fact that you can get arrested for a Facebook post in Israel is already alarming.
In what country can you never be arrested for a Facebook post?
In the US which has freedom of speech laws. But which country has arrested users for Facebook posts other than authoritarian countries? Particularly for such a relatively innocuous post.
Re: Facebook apologizes after wrong translation sees Palestinian man arrested
#37This is scary and 1984 ish. A man was arrested because of a bad translation.
Collateral damage. People are routinely murdered for being in the same area as people who are suspected of terrorism on the basis of evidence which has never seen a courtroom.
Not sure if you're saying that makes it OK. I don't think that makes it OK.
Re: Facebook apologizes after wrong translation sees Palestinian man arrested
#38The fact that you can get arrested for a Facebook post in Israel is already alarming.
Also it appears they have a feed of posts they parse automatically. There is nothing in the article that says someone called the police over the post.
Re: Facebook apologizes after wrong translation sees Palestinian man arrested
#39This is scary and 1984 ish. A man was arrested because of a bad translation.
Arrested because a huge centralized corporation based on collecting people personal data to profile them has replaced humans by machines which made an obvious mistake.
Then other people reported said man to local authorities who acted on it without checking the source.
Re: Facebook apologizes after wrong translation sees Palestinian man arrested
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
A lot of them do, it's very common for Israeli's to be fluent in Arabic. But not all of them obviously. And in this case, considering what someone with evil intent and a bulldozer can do, I can understand arrest first, figure out what's going on second. It's not like arresting someone after the fact - in that situation you can take some time. Here it's before the fact, and seconds count.
Unless it's the police driving the bulldozer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Corrie
Are you trying to derail the conversion? This is not appropriate.
Delete it before people start posting defense/accusations of what happened then, which has absolutely nothing to do with this thread.