[shmageggy]

What you wrote is literally the exact meaning I intended with the title, but now reading some comments I see many people are interpreting it as "Google atttempts to patent deep neural networkS for machine translation", (notice the plural) which has a vastly different meaning. I guess I assumed that this audience would know that it wouldn't be remotely possible to patent a broad technique that's already so widely published.

I think that even though the application is for a specific architecture, that this is still worth knowing about, since LSTM is a such well known technique for dealing with sequential data like sentences, and since so far virtually all progress in AI and ML has been driven by academia and has remained open.

I also think it's important to note that pretty much any interesting machine translation task will contain rare words, so even though they've framed it in terms of a specific task, it's one that's actually extremely broad. Machine translation is not so hard when you have tons of data and when you've seen every word many times in combination with its translations. The only really interesting case is when we have to use background knowledge and context to infer meaning. Since natural languages are notoriously ambiguous, this happens all the time. So this app may be broader than it first appears.