Hitting human parity in a machine translation task is a dream that all of us have had, said Xuedong Huang, a technical fellow in charge of Microsoft’s speech, natural language and machine translation efforts, in Microsoft’s blog post … Machine translation is much more complex than a pure pattern recognition task, said Ming Zhou, assistant managing director of Microsoft Research Asia and head of a natural language processing group that worked on the project … Machine translation is something researchers at Google have been working on as well, including with its own machine learning technique for Chinese-English queries that also uses neural nets.