Statistical machine translation

Abstract

Statistical machine translation (SMT) treats the translation of natural language as a machine learning problem. By examining many samples of human-produced translation, SMT algorithms automatically learn how to translate. SMT has made tremendous strides in less than two decades, and new ideas are constantly introduced. This survey presents a tutorial overview of the state of the art. We describe the context of the current research and then move to a formal problem description and an overview of the main subproblems: translation modeling, parameter estimation, and decoding. Along the way, we present a taxonomy of some different approaches within these areas. We conclude with an overview of evaluation and a discussion of future directions.

Document Details

Document Type
Pub Defense Publication
Publication Date
Aug 01, 2008
Source ID
10.1145/1380584.1380586

Entities

People

  • Adam Lopez

Organizations

  • Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
  • Office of Naval Research
  • University of Edinburgh

Tags

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Computational Linguistics
  • Systems Analysis and Design

Technology Areas

  • AI & ML
  • AI & ML - Machine Translation
  • AI & ML - Neural Networks