What impact does machine translation have on foreign trade?



Machine translation that incorporates machine learning provides a number of services with high accuracy even if it is free, and there are various aspects such as reading overseas papers and websites and interacting with foreigners. It is useful in. Machine translation also plays an important role in the economy, and a research team at the

National Bureau of Economic Research reports how much sales have changed as a result of the introduction of machine translation by the Internet auction site eBay .

Does Machine Translation Affect International Trade? Evidence from a Large Digital Platform
(PDF file) https://www.nber.org/papers/w24917.pdf

Machine translation 'eMT' equipped with eBay's unique machine learning system supports the buying and selling of products by translating the characteristics of items that are not described in the purchaser's native language in an easy-to-understand manner. eMT's machine learning model trains translations by training on both eBay-created data and data automatically collected from the web, working in real-time for high-quality translations in milliseconds. It is possible.

One of the features of eMT is to translate the buyer's search query and the product title in parallel. For example, if a buyer enters a Spanish keyword in the search box, eMT will quickly translate the Spanish query into English and search results based on the relevance of the translated query to the English product title. Get. Then, the search result page is translated into Spanish and displayed. For buyers from Spanish-speaking countries such as Latin America, the localized web is as if they were visiting a Spanish website, searching in Spanish, and seeing the Spanish title in the search results. It is possible to operate the site.

eBay has been rolling out eMT in Russia, Latin America and the EU since around 2014. The research team focused on eMT's support for Spanish translation in Latin America and investigated how export volumes changed before and after the introduction of eMT.

The graph below shows the changes in export volume from the United States before and after the introduction of Spanish machine translation on eBay. The red line shows Latin America, and the blue dashed line shows export volume to other countries. The gray dotted line indicates the time when machine translation was introduced for inquiries, and the black one-dot chain line indicates the time when machine translation was introduced for product titles, and it can be seen that exports to Latin America have increased significantly around this time. According to the research team, exports to Latin America increased by an average of about 20% after the introduction of machine translation.



Below is a graph showing the increase in exports by category. Data from 6 months before and 6 months after the introduction of Spanish machine translation are listed in descending order of export volume growth in each category on eBay. The vertical axis is each category, and from the top, categories such as 'specialized services', 'money', 'dolls', 'cameras and photographs', 'babies', 'clothes / shoes / accessories' are lined up.



The categories with increased exports may seem inconsistent, but the research team said, 'The more cheap products and items in a category, the more people will search, so it is possible that exports in those categories have increased. I'm guessing. In addition, the export increase rate was larger for products containing more words in the title. Compared to products with at least 20 words in the title, products with less than 13 words in the title grew 6-10% less in exports.

The research team said, 'This result has two main implications. First, the language barrier is a major obstacle to trade. Second, AI is already affecting productivity and trade. It has great potential to enhance each. In addition to machine translation, AI applications are emerging in other fields as well. Various applications by AI such as voice recognition, recommendation system, medical diagnosis, customer support, etc. It is offered. The impact of each new system online will provide new opportunities to assess the economic impact of AI through natural experiments such as those discussed in this paper. '

in Note, Posted by darkhorse_log