Statistical machine translation

TLDR

Statistical machine translation uses statistical techniques to rapidly build translators for any language pair from parallel texts, and is becoming central to global communication and commerce. The book presents classroom‑tested courses and tutorials, supported by a companion website offering open‑source corpora and toolkits, making it suitable for advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and NLP researchers.

Abstract

This introductory text to statistical machine translation (SMT) provides all of the theories and methods needed to build a statistical machine translator, such as Google Language Tools and Babelfish. In general, statistical techniques allow automatic translation systems to be built quickly for any language-pair using only translated texts and generic software. With increasing globalization, statistical machine translation will be central to communication and commerce. Based on courses and tutorials, and classroom-tested globally, it is ideal for instruction or self-study, for advanced undergraduates and graduate students in computer science and/or computational linguistics, and researchers in natural language processing. The companion website provides open-source corpora and tool-kits.