Yandex Is Translating World's Rarest Languages

The Russian search engine Yandex has developed a way to translate some of the world's rarest languages. Yandex Translate has developed a complex statistical model that understands rare languages by comparing its linguistic patterns with more common languages. It picks up on similarities in morphology, syntax and vocabulary and applies the rules of the similar, more common language to the rare language. This allows for more and better translations of the rare language, even if there is not a large amount of source text in this language. As well as helping to translate rare languages, Yandex hopes that the statistical model will also help linguists to gain a better understanding of the links between different languages.

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