''Our ultimate goal is to enable intuitive and natural conversations between machines and humans,'' she said, adding that this goal would likely be reached in five years.Īmong many languages, Korean is by far the most complex to teach a machine, she says. The toughest challenge for AI, Choe says, is language. ''I only followed my passion for language studies and here I am,'' says Choe, who leads a growing team of computational and analytical linguists working for Google Assistant.Īs Senior Staff Analytical Linguist, Choe's job is to make Google's artificial intelligence (AI)-powered virtual assistant understand and speak more like a human. She works at Google's world headquarters, spearheading next-generation technology and overseeing hundreds of staff at the tech powerhouse.īut the 39-year-old says none of this was something she had ever dreamed of. For comparison, estimates about literacy rates in the USA suggest that the figure there is around 86%.MOUNTAIN VIEW, CALIFORNIA ― In the eyes of many, Choe Hyun-jeong has a dream job. This fascinating script has had a tangible positive effect on social life beyond plain pride – the literacy rate across the Korean peninsula is exceptionally high – close to 100%. In the interests of brevity, there is even a comic that claims to be able to teach you Korean in 15 minutes – but even that might be generous, once you get into the swing of things. The syllabic blocks of Hangul used to be written vertically, copying the prestige style of Chinese script, but now is written left-to-right – and even with western punctuation. A few combinations of these three elements account for all the vowel permutations possible in Korean.Īs mentioned above, it is an alphabet that is arranged in sequential syllables so the syllable 한 han might look like a standalone character, it is actually composed of three letters: ㅎ h, ㅏ a, and ㄴ n. Getting a character system to represent these many complex variations is a bit like enlisting Lionel Messi to regulate an entire country’s tax code – his skills just lie elsewhere.Īpart from the consonant set, the remaining symbols are vowel markers, which are composed of just three elements a horizontal line representing the flat Earth, the essence of yin a point representing the Sun, the essence of yang and a vertical line which represents an upright human, seen as the mediator between these two. Where Chinese is analytic, Korean is agglutinative, meaning that new words are formed by ‘gluing’ new elements onto old ones as prefixes and suffixes, and in turn that words can vary massively in length, often being very long. Hanja was, by the way, the most abysmal compromise possible for a language like Korean, which in one very important way is the diametric opposite of Chinese. Efforts to find a functional Romanization for Chinese have stumbled partially because Chinese has untold homophones, which can be distinguished by graphical characters, but less easily with phonemic symbols. Now, a language borrowing the writing system of another one is a rather mundane occurrence English writing is a modification of Roman script, which is a modification of the Greek system, which in turn is descended from the Phoenician alphabet.īut it turns out that different writing systems are not all equally well equipped to capture the full range of a language’s grammar.Ī character system works relatively well for Chinese, because it is an analytic language, meaning that words tend to be very small and atomized, so a one-to-one relationship with an image can be established.
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