The Candide system for machine translation

Abstract

We present an overview of Candide, a system for automatic translation of French text to English text. Candide uses methods of information theory and statistics to develop a probability model of the translation process. This model, which is made to accord as closely as possible with a large body of French and English sentence pairs, is then used to generate English translations of previously unseen French sentences. This paper provides a tutorial in these methods, discussions of the training and operation of the system, and a summary of test results.