The translation of foreign language texts by computers was one of the first tasks that the pioneers of computing and artificial intelligence set themselves. Machine translation is again becoming an important field of research and development as the need for translations of technical and commercial documentation is growing beyond the capacity of the translation profession.

Learn how to build machine translation systems with deep learning from the ground up, from basic concepts to cutting-edge research.

A concise, nontechnical overview of the development of machine translation, including the different approaches, evaluation issues, and major players in the industry. The dream of a universal translation device goes back many decades, long before Douglas Adams's fictional Babel fish provided this service in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Since the advent of computers, research has focused on the design of digital machine translation tools—computer programs capable of automatically translating a text from a source language to a target language. This has become one of the most fundamental tasks of artificial intelligence. This volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series offers a concise, nontechnical overview of the development of machine translation, including the different approaches, evaluation issues, and market potential. The main approaches are presented from a largely historical perspective and in an intuitive manner, allowing the reader to understand the main principles without knowing the mathematical details. The book begins by discussing problems that must be solved during the development of a machine translation system and offering a brief overview of the evolution of the field. It then takes up the history of machine translation in more detail, describing its pre-digital beginnings, rule-based approaches, the 1966 ALPAC (Automatic Language Processing Advisory Committee) report and its consequences, the advent of parallel corpora, the example-based paradigm, the statistical paradigm, the segment-based approach, the introduction of more linguistic knowledge into the systems, and the latest approaches based on deep learning. Finally, it considers evaluation challenges and the commercial status of the field, including activities by such major players as Google and Systran.

The field of machine translation (MT) - the automation of translation between human languages - has existed for more than 50 years. MT helped to usher in the field of computational linguistics and has influenced methods and applications in knowledge representation, information theory, and mathematical statistics.

The dream of automatic language translation is now closer thanks to recent advances in the techniques that underpin statistical machine translation. This class-tested textbook from an active researcher in the field, provides a clear and careful introduction to the latest methods and explains how to build machine translation systems for any two languages. It introduces the subject's building blocks from linguistics and probability, then covers the major models for machine translation: word-based, phrase-based, and tree-based, as well as machine translation evaluation, language modeling, discriminative training and advanced methods to integrate linguistic annotation. The book also reports the latest research, presents the major outstanding challenges, and enables novices as well as experienced researchers to make novel contributions to this exciting area. Ideal for students at undergraduate and graduate level, or for anyone interested in the latest developments in machine translation.

Machine translation (MT) is the area of computer science and applied linguistics dealing with the translation of human languages such as English and German. MT on the Internet has become an important tool by providing fast, economical and useful translations. With globalisation and expanding trade, demand for translation is set to grow. Translation Engines covers theoretical and practical aspects of MT, both classic and new, including: - Character sets and formatting languages - Translation memory - Linguistic and computational foundations - Basic computational linguistic techniques - Transfer and interlingua MT - Evaluation Software accompanies the text, providing readers with hands on experience of the main algorithms.

This book describes a novel, cross-linguistic approach to machine translation that solves certain classes of syntactic and lexical divergences by means of a lexical conceptual structure that can be composed and decomposed in language-specific ways. This approach allows the translator to operate uniformly across many languages, while still accounting for knowledge that is specific to each language.

This unique book provides a comprehensive introduction to the most popular syntax-based statistical machine translation models, filling a gap in the current literature for researchers and developers in human language technologies. While phrase-based models have previously dominated the field, syntax-based approaches have proved a popular alternative, as they elegantly solve many of the shortcomings of phrase-based models. The heart of this book is a detailed introduction to decoding for syntax-based models. The book begins with an overview of synchronous-context free grammar (SCFG) and synchronous tree-substitution grammar (STSG) along with their associated statistical models. It also describes how three popular instantiations (Hiero, SAMT, and GHKM) are learned from parallel corpora. It introduces and details hypergraphs and associated general algorithms, as well as algorithms for decoding with both tree and string input. Special attention is given to efficiency, including search approximations such as beam search and cube pruning, data structures, and parsing algorithms. The book consistently highlights the strengths (and limitations) of syntax-based approaches, including their ability to generalize phrase-based translation units, their modeling of specific linguistic phenomena, and their function of structuring the search space.

Machine translation has become increasingly popular, especially with the introduction of neural machine translation in major online translation systems. However, despite the rapid advances in machine translation, the role of a human translator remains crucial. As illustrated by the chapters in this book, man-machine interaction is essential in machine translation, localisation, terminology management, and crowdsourcing translation. In fact, the importance of a human translator before, during, and after machine processing, cannot be overemphasised as human intervention is the best way to ensure the translation quality of machine translation. This volume explores the role of a human translator in machine translation from various perspectives, affording a comprehensive look at this topical research area. This book is essential reading for anyone involved in translation studies, machine translation or interested in translation technology.