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Machine Translation
About this book
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 toolsâcomputer 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.
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Information
Table of contents
- Cover
- Series page
- Title page
- Copyright page
- Table of Contents
- Series Foreword
- Acknowledgments
- 1âIntroduction
- 2âThe Trouble with Translation
- 3âA Quick Overview of the Evolution of Machine Translation
- 4âBefore the Advent of ComputersâŚ
- 5âThe Beginnings of Machine Translation: The First Rule-Based Systems
- 6âThe 1966 ALPAC Report and Its Consequences
- 7âParallel Corpora and Sentence Alignment
- 8âExample-Based Machine Translation
- 9âStatistical Machine Translation and Word Alignment
- 10âSegment-Based Machine Translation
- 11âChallenges and Limitations of Statistical Machine Translation
- 12âDeep Learning Machine Translation
- 13âThe Evaluation of Machine Translation Systems
- 14âThe Machine Translation Industry: Between Professional and Mass-Market Applications
- 15âConclusion: The Future of Machine Translation
- Glossary
- Bibliography and Further Reading
- Index
- About Author