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Facebook apologizes after wrong translation sees Palestinian man arrested

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Re: Facebook apologizes after wrong translation sees Palestinian man arrested

#71

Post by tgb »

shp0ngle wrote: post #32
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #6

Given 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 terroris…

Given that both Arabic and English are official languages of the UN (and in which all UN documents are written), wouldn't those documents form (a large part) of the data for training? Not that that would have much in the way of "Good morning" in it except perhaps speech transcriptions.

Re: Facebook apologizes after wrong translation sees Palestinian man arrested

#72

Post by Udik »

kfrzcode wrote: post #55
shp0ngle wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 terroris…

> Most sources for machine translation from Arabic-English pairs are data from US Army / anti-terrorist data. Interesting! This is HN, where's the source? > I cannot give you exact sources I find your claim hard enough to believe but this seals the deal.

It'll turn out in due time that Bin Laden was just sending the US his best wishes.

Joking of course, but up to a point. There are cases of words from the "enemy" deliberately translated in their more literal sense when their sense is figurative (one for all, "death to America"- even the official translation is "down with America"). And statements by Bin Laden himself have been deliberately ignored in the parts that made more sense from a political point of view, to reduce them to a more comfortable "we hate you because you're free".

Re: Facebook apologizes after wrong translation sees Palestinian man arrested

#73

Post by elietoubi »

Crazy!!! ... let's take politics aside for a sec. What if the man was actually planning an attack? That would be really crazy that an AI tool could actually find that with the context of the picture.

Let's give another example ... let's say I pose with a fake gun and I write: "Ready to party" would the algorithm render a different translation than if I posed with balloons?

Re: Facebook apologizes after wrong translation sees Palestinian man arrested

#74

Post by detaro »

ars wrote: post #45
pjc50 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

One post could be a mistake, but two posts like this is not an accident. This is not the right forum for you to start attacking Israel about everything and anything.

Extrajudical killings is more a US drone strike topic than an Israel one.

Re: Facebook apologizes after wrong translation sees Palestinian man arrested

#75

Post by eh78ssxv2f »

bigbugbag wrote: post #47
maxerickson wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blame should rest mostly on the police.

IMHO responsibility is 90% facebook, 8% people who reported it and 2% police. I do not expect police officers to be expert in using facebook.

I think it is 99% police. I do not use FB translate, but Google translate. Sometimes it works, sometimes it does not. I expect that it is not 100% reliable, and anybody who frequently uses the automated translation tools for critical tasks (presumably the police in this case) should know this. My suspicion is that this was just an excuse for the police to arrest somebody.

Re: Facebook apologizes after wrong translation sees Palestinian man arrested

#76

Post by kwhitefoot »

hodgesrm wrote: post #66
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #6

Given 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.

A while back I heard a story from a doctor friend about colleagues who would use Google Translate to translate notes to Spanish-speaking patients. That kind of stuff is an accident waiting to happen. The issue is not machine learning per se although that's behind a lot of the free services that have popped up. Rather it's that once you get outside the scope of translations the system can handle the results may be cat…

Always get the machine to translate it back again as a first check that you haven't got something that the system isn't good at. I use it often when I write Norwegian because even after thirty years I still don't remember what gender everything is (I'm English but I write in Norwegian when writing to the locals). If I don't get my original Norwegian back I know it's worth a closer look.

Doing it from your own language to a language you don't speak at all without at least that simple double check is asking for trouble.

Re: Facebook apologizes after wrong translation sees Palestinian man arrested

#77

Post by _dke7 »

ch4s3 wrote: post #4

The operative quote from the article is: "no Arabic-speaking officer had read the man’s Facebook post." This reminds me of the kind of alarmist, ham fisted policing we often see in America, where police will barge into an elderly person's home and trash the place because they forgot to double check the address.

This is unsurprising considering the US / Israeli Police coordination. [1] Additionally many similar cases of Israeli police being repressive against Palestinians have been well documented [2].

[1] https://theintercept.com/2017/09/15/police-israel-cops-train...

[2] https://www.amnesty.org/en/countries/middle-east-and-north-a...

Re: Facebook apologizes after wrong translation sees Palestinian man arrested

#78

Post by FourPostWonder »

acobster wrote: post #33
FourPostWonder wrote: post #11

The 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...

The Butterfly War describes a theory of meta data warfare that forces a predator to change its behavior and target people it's been trained not to target.

In this case, the connection between Silicon Valley and national security apparatuses are so hypervigilant, everyone in the anaylsis pipeline accepted the meta data that arrested this guy to be sufficient.

The Butterfly War teaches you how to put anyone you want into that pipeline.

Re: Facebook apologizes after wrong translation sees Palestinian man arrested

#79

Post by asddddd »

FourPostWonder wrote: post #11

The 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/

An amusing read, but the overbearing narcissism (I did this; something happened; that something is therefore caused by my action) makes it hard to read as a rational argument and not a psychoanalysis case study.

Re: Facebook apologizes after wrong translation sees Palestinian man arrested

#80

Post by Synaesthesia »

psyc wrote: post #58
Synaesthesia wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"Authoritarian country" is too prone to no-true-scottsmanship. So I'll just say that it's fairly common in the U.K., and definitely not unheard of in the U.S. Even if someone legally should not be arrested, people are people, and the police will often detain someone just to be on the safe side, when responding to a complaint. Putting something on Facebook opens you up to complaints from a potentially wide audience of…

Sorry I should have added charges and found guilty. Because Israel has imprisoned people based on Facebook posts.
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