It would be interesting to find out what their models are like.

Decades ago, as an undergrad project, I once fed a whole bunch of text from a couple of books into my program that ran a simple Markov model (I was a very fast keypuncher). The results were, well, humorous at times and amazing at others.

My very intitial reaction, though, was that the headline was missing a “be” (as well as having a superfluos s) and that it was trying to say that a new translation computer made by google could be better than some other unidentified translation tool.

The second issue is “betters” which, while a proper use of the word, is an archaic one. The most common form is “better,” used strictly in a comparative sense. While I have no statistics to back me up, I suspect that the current second-most-common usage of “betters” is to refer to one’s superiors (usually referring to social class), though that is more, I think an archaic and a British usage. “Don’t contradict your betters, young man.” In the sense of “improve,” “betters” is, I think, fairly uncommon. It just doesn’t initially strike us as a verb at first glance.

Thus, we see in the headline “might betters.” The “might” following a concrete noun (computer) leads us to believe that the next word will be a verb. Then we see the next word and it does not appear at first glance to be a verb. Thus, we must retreat to a manual parsing of the sentence rather than an automatic, autonomous one.

Incidentally, the New York Times has rewritten the headline. It now reads: Google’s Computing Power Refines Translation Tool.

One almost wonders whether the original headline was some sort of inside joke, written in another language and translated to English automatically via Google’s service.

[EV says: I should have included the link in the first place, and your comment prompted me to do that. Thanks!]

PatHMV says:decide whether I need to listen to it or not.
Who knows… maybe the first sentient computer will arise in a Google server complex somewhere!

Where’s Sarah Conner when you need her?

And this one (New York Times, March 8; thanks to Helenmary Sheridan) is a really good one, which they might better have rephrased:

Google’s Computer Might Betters Translation Tool

Took me a full extra second or two (and that is a long time in sentence processing) to find the main clause verb.

It took me an extra second or two to realize that Pullum was providing the original phrasing, not a rephrasing. And more than 10 seconds to properly interpret that phrasing. I next skimmed the comments and was initially surprised, and a bit intrigued, to see PatHMV admitting to having used Google Vice.

I plan to avoid major decisions today.

I’ve recently been using Google Voice. All calls to my home phone number are forwarded to it. I’ve chosen to have them go all to Google’s messaging service, which records the message like normal voice mail, but also transcribes it automatically and e-mails (or texts, at my option) the transcription to me. A neat feature of the transcription is that the words it is sure about are in black text, while the words it’s not sure about are in grey text. I’ve yet to spot a black-colored word as being incorrectly transcribed. It’s far from perfect, but once again, the transcription is good enough to give me the gist of the message, so I can decide whether I need to listen to it or not.

Who knows… maybe the first sentient computer will arise in a Google server complex somewhere!