General Introduction

The field of statistical machine translation concerns itself with methods to automatically learn how to translate from translated texts (so-called parallel corpora).

Introduction and its 7 sub-topics are the main subject of 981 publications.

Publications

Hutchins (2007) gives a concise overview of the history of machine translation. Jelinek (2009) recalls the birth of statistical machine translation, and previously statistical speech recognition, at IBM. See also the famous ALPAC report (Pierce and Carroll, 1966). Gaspari and Hutchins (2007) reports on the recent rise of online machine translation services and usage patterns. Recently, a textbook about the field was published (Koehn, 2010). A survey of work in statistical machine translation is presented by Lopez (2008). For non-statistical methods to machine translation, refer to the books by Arnold et al. (1994) and by Hutchins and Somers (1992). A good introduction into probability theory and information is given by Cover and Thomas (1991). For an application of probabilistic methods to the related field of speech recognition, see the book by Jelinek (1998). There are several textbooks on natural language processing that may serve as background to the material presented here. Good general introductions are given by Manning and Schütze (1999) as well as Jurafsky and Martin (2008).

Benchmarks

Each year, a few evaluation campaigns are staged whose aim is to assess the validity of novel methods in competitive systems.

Discussion

New Publications

• Sara Morrissey and Andy Way (2013): Manual labour: tackling machine translation for sign languages, Machine Translation mentioned in Introduction and Sign Language

  DELETEIntroduction   ResearchGroups   AvailableSoftware   SpeechTranslation   SignLanguage   ComputerAidedTranslation   OtherApproaches   Deployment Data   ParallelCorpora   ComparableCorpora   Dictionaries   CorpusCleaning   SentenceAlignment   Truecasing   WordSegmentation   SpellingCorrection   SparseData   PivotLanguages   DomainAdaptation WordBasedModels   IBMModels   Symmetrization   WordAlignment     WordAlignmentBasedOnCoocurrence     WordAlignmentWithLinguisticAnnotation     WordAlignmentForSyntaxBasedModels     DiscriminativeWordAlignment     WordAlignmentCombination     WordAlignmentEvaluation     AlignmentOfSubsententialUnits   DictionariesFromComparableCorpora   LexicalChoice   MTWithoutWordAlignment PhraseBasedModels   PhraseBasedModelTraining   PhraseBasedModelEM   PhraseBasedModelRefinement   ContextFeatures   Smoothing   Paraphrasing   PruningLargeModels   SuffixArrays   ReorderingModels   PhraseBasedVsEBMT SyntaxBasedModels   InversionTransductionGrammars   HierarchicalModels   StringToTree   TreeToString   TreeToTree   BinarizingSCFG   GenerativeSyntaxModels   DependencyStructure   DeepSyntax   ParseQuality   ParallelTreebanks   SyntacticCoherence LinguisticProblems   UnknownWords   Morphology   GeneratingRichMorphology   FactoredTranslationModels   Compounds   TranslatingTenseCaseMarkers   TranslatingChunksAndClauses   DocumentLevelAspects   Transliteration     TransliterationWithFSM     TransliterationWithOtherMethods     ForwardTransliteration     TransliterationTrainingData     IntegratingTransliteration   SyntacticPrereordering   POSChunkPrereordering   SyntacticReranking   IntegratingSyntacticFeatures LanguageModels   NGramLanguageModels   TargetedLanguageModels   MorphologicalLanguageModels   VeryLargeLanguageModels Decoding   StackDecoding   ReorderingConstraints   WordBasedDecoding   FiniteStateMachines   DecodingComplexity   SyntaxModelDecoding Evaluation   EvaluationCampaigns   ManualMetrics   TaskBasedMetrics   EditRateMetrics   NGramMetrics   SyntaxBasedMetrics   CorrelationOfMetrics   TrainedMetrics   TranslationDifficulty   StatisticalSignificance MachineLearning   WordGraphs   ParameterTuning   Reranking   LargeScaleDiscriminativeTraining   MinimumBayesRisk   ConfidenceMeasures   SystemCombination   IncrementalUpdating NeuralNetworkModels   NeuralLanguageModels   AttentionModel   Training   Inference   Coverage   Vocabulary   Embeddings   MultilingualWordEmbeddings   MonolingualData   Adaptation   LinguisticAnnotation   MultilingualMultimodalMultitask   AlternativeArchitectures   AnalysisAndVisualization   NeuralComponentsInStatisticalMachineTranslation add

  

  @article{mtj13-Morrissey,
  author = {Sara Morrissey and Andy Way},
  title = {Manual labour: tackling machine translation for sign languages},
  pages = {25--64},
  journal = {Machine Translation},
  volume = {27},
  number = {1},
  month = {March},
  year = 2013
  }
  Morrissey and Way (2013)
• Adam Lopez and Matt Post and Chris Callison-Burch and Jonathan Weese and Juri Ganitkevitch and Narges Ahmidi and Olivia Buzek and Leah Hanson and Beaniesh Jamil and Matthias Lee and Ya-Ting Lin and Henry Pao and Fatima Rivera and Leili Shahriyari and Debu Sinha and Adam Teichert and Stephen Wampler and Michael Weinberger and Daguang Xu and Lin Yang and Shang Zhao (2013): Learning to translate with products of novices: a suite of open-ended challenge problems for teaching MT, Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics (TACL)

  DELETEIntroduction   ResearchGroups   AvailableSoftware   SpeechTranslation   SignLanguage   ComputerAidedTranslation   OtherApproaches   Deployment Data   ParallelCorpora   ComparableCorpora   Dictionaries   CorpusCleaning   SentenceAlignment   Truecasing   WordSegmentation   SpellingCorrection   SparseData   PivotLanguages   DomainAdaptation WordBasedModels   IBMModels   Symmetrization   WordAlignment     WordAlignmentBasedOnCoocurrence     WordAlignmentWithLinguisticAnnotation     WordAlignmentForSyntaxBasedModels     DiscriminativeWordAlignment     WordAlignmentCombination     WordAlignmentEvaluation     AlignmentOfSubsententialUnits   DictionariesFromComparableCorpora   LexicalChoice   MTWithoutWordAlignment PhraseBasedModels   PhraseBasedModelTraining   PhraseBasedModelEM   PhraseBasedModelRefinement   ContextFeatures   Smoothing   Paraphrasing   PruningLargeModels   SuffixArrays   ReorderingModels   PhraseBasedVsEBMT SyntaxBasedModels   InversionTransductionGrammars   HierarchicalModels   StringToTree   TreeToString   TreeToTree   BinarizingSCFG   GenerativeSyntaxModels   DependencyStructure   DeepSyntax   ParseQuality   ParallelTreebanks   SyntacticCoherence LinguisticProblems   UnknownWords   Morphology   GeneratingRichMorphology   FactoredTranslationModels   Compounds   TranslatingTenseCaseMarkers   TranslatingChunksAndClauses   DocumentLevelAspects   Transliteration     TransliterationWithFSM     TransliterationWithOtherMethods     ForwardTransliteration     TransliterationTrainingData     IntegratingTransliteration   SyntacticPrereordering   POSChunkPrereordering   SyntacticReranking   IntegratingSyntacticFeatures LanguageModels   NGramLanguageModels   TargetedLanguageModels   MorphologicalLanguageModels   VeryLargeLanguageModels Decoding   StackDecoding   ReorderingConstraints   WordBasedDecoding   FiniteStateMachines   DecodingComplexity   SyntaxModelDecoding Evaluation   EvaluationCampaigns   ManualMetrics   TaskBasedMetrics   EditRateMetrics   NGramMetrics   SyntaxBasedMetrics   CorrelationOfMetrics   TrainedMetrics   TranslationDifficulty   StatisticalSignificance MachineLearning   WordGraphs   ParameterTuning   Reranking   LargeScaleDiscriminativeTraining   MinimumBayesRisk   ConfidenceMeasures   SystemCombination   IncrementalUpdating NeuralNetworkModels   NeuralLanguageModels   AttentionModel   Training   Inference   Coverage   Vocabulary   Embeddings   MultilingualWordEmbeddings   MonolingualData   Adaptation   LinguisticAnnotation   MultilingualMultimodalMultitask   AlternativeArchitectures   AnalysisAndVisualization   NeuralComponentsInStatisticalMachineTranslation add

  

  @inproceedings{tacl13-lopez,
  author = {Adam Lopez and Matt Post and Chris Callison-Burch and Jonathan Weese and Juri Ganitkevitch and Narges Ahmidi and Olivia Buzek and Leah Hanson and Beaniesh Jamil and Matthias Lee and Ya-Ting Lin and Henry Pao and Fatima Rivera and Leili Shahriyari and Debu Sinha and Adam Teichert and Stephen Wampler and Michael Weinberger and Daguang Xu and Lin Yang and Shang Zhao},
  title = {Learning to translate with products of novices: a suite of open-ended challenge problems for teaching MT},
  number = {1},
  month = {May},
  pages = {165--178},
  url = {http://www.transacl.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/paper165.pdf},
  booktitle = {Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics (TACL)},
  year = 2013
  }
  Lopez et al. (2013)
• Adam Lopez and Matt Post and Chris Callison-Burch and Jonathan Weese and Juri Ganitkevitch and Narges Ahmidi and Olivia Buzek and Leah Hanson and Beaniesh Jamil and Matthias Lee and Ya-Ting Lin and Henry Pao and Fatima Rivera and Leili Shahriyari and Debu Sinha and Adam Teichert and Stephen Wampler and Michael Weinberger and Daguang Xu and Lin Yang and Shang Zhao (2013): Learning to translate with products of novices: a suite of open-ended challenge problems for teaching MT, Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics (TACL)

  DELETEIntroduction   ResearchGroups   AvailableSoftware   SpeechTranslation   SignLanguage   ComputerAidedTranslation   OtherApproaches   Deployment Data   ParallelCorpora   ComparableCorpora   Dictionaries   CorpusCleaning   SentenceAlignment   Truecasing   WordSegmentation   SpellingCorrection   SparseData   PivotLanguages   DomainAdaptation WordBasedModels   IBMModels   Symmetrization   WordAlignment     WordAlignmentBasedOnCoocurrence     WordAlignmentWithLinguisticAnnotation     WordAlignmentForSyntaxBasedModels     DiscriminativeWordAlignment     WordAlignmentCombination     WordAlignmentEvaluation     AlignmentOfSubsententialUnits   DictionariesFromComparableCorpora   LexicalChoice   MTWithoutWordAlignment PhraseBasedModels   PhraseBasedModelTraining   PhraseBasedModelEM   PhraseBasedModelRefinement   ContextFeatures   Smoothing   Paraphrasing   PruningLargeModels   SuffixArrays   ReorderingModels   PhraseBasedVsEBMT SyntaxBasedModels   InversionTransductionGrammars   HierarchicalModels   StringToTree   TreeToString   TreeToTree   BinarizingSCFG   GenerativeSyntaxModels   DependencyStructure   DeepSyntax   ParseQuality   ParallelTreebanks   SyntacticCoherence LinguisticProblems   UnknownWords   Morphology   GeneratingRichMorphology   FactoredTranslationModels   Compounds   TranslatingTenseCaseMarkers   TranslatingChunksAndClauses   DocumentLevelAspects   Transliteration     TransliterationWithFSM     TransliterationWithOtherMethods     ForwardTransliteration     TransliterationTrainingData     IntegratingTransliteration   SyntacticPrereordering   POSChunkPrereordering   SyntacticReranking   IntegratingSyntacticFeatures LanguageModels   NGramLanguageModels   TargetedLanguageModels   MorphologicalLanguageModels   VeryLargeLanguageModels Decoding   StackDecoding   ReorderingConstraints   WordBasedDecoding   FiniteStateMachines   DecodingComplexity   SyntaxModelDecoding Evaluation   EvaluationCampaigns   ManualMetrics   TaskBasedMetrics   EditRateMetrics   NGramMetrics   SyntaxBasedMetrics   CorrelationOfMetrics   TrainedMetrics   TranslationDifficulty   StatisticalSignificance MachineLearning   WordGraphs   ParameterTuning   Reranking   LargeScaleDiscriminativeTraining   MinimumBayesRisk   ConfidenceMeasures   SystemCombination   IncrementalUpdating NeuralNetworkModels   NeuralLanguageModels   AttentionModel   Training   Inference   Coverage   Vocabulary   Embeddings   MultilingualWordEmbeddings   MonolingualData   Adaptation   LinguisticAnnotation   MultilingualMultimodalMultitask   AlternativeArchitectures   AnalysisAndVisualization   NeuralComponentsInStatisticalMachineTranslation add

  

  @inproceedings{tacl13-lopez,
  author = {Adam Lopez and Matt Post and Chris Callison-Burch and Jonathan Weese and Juri Ganitkevitch and Narges Ahmidi and Olivia Buzek and Leah Hanson and Beaniesh Jamil and Matthias Lee and Ya-Ting Lin and Henry Pao and Fatima Rivera and Leili Shahriyari and Debu Sinha and Adam Teichert and Stephen Wampler and Michael Weinberger and Daguang Xu and Lin Yang and Shang Zhao},
  title = {Learning to translate with products of novices: a suite of open-ended challenge problems for teaching MT},
  number = {1},
  month = {May},
  pages = {165--178},
  url = {http://www.transacl.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/paper165.pdf},
  booktitle = {Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics (TACL)},
  year = 2013
  }
  Lopez et al. (2013)
• Cancedda, Nicola (2012): Private Access to Phrase Tables for Statistical Machine Translation, Proceedings of the 50th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)

  DELETEIntroduction   ResearchGroups   AvailableSoftware   SpeechTranslation   SignLanguage   ComputerAidedTranslation   OtherApproaches   Deployment Data   ParallelCorpora   ComparableCorpora   Dictionaries   CorpusCleaning   SentenceAlignment   Truecasing   WordSegmentation   SpellingCorrection   SparseData   PivotLanguages   DomainAdaptation WordBasedModels   IBMModels   Symmetrization   WordAlignment     WordAlignmentBasedOnCoocurrence     WordAlignmentWithLinguisticAnnotation     WordAlignmentForSyntaxBasedModels     DiscriminativeWordAlignment     WordAlignmentCombination     WordAlignmentEvaluation     AlignmentOfSubsententialUnits   DictionariesFromComparableCorpora   LexicalChoice   MTWithoutWordAlignment PhraseBasedModels   PhraseBasedModelTraining   PhraseBasedModelEM   PhraseBasedModelRefinement   ContextFeatures   Smoothing   Paraphrasing   PruningLargeModels   SuffixArrays   ReorderingModels   PhraseBasedVsEBMT SyntaxBasedModels   InversionTransductionGrammars   HierarchicalModels   StringToTree   TreeToString   TreeToTree   BinarizingSCFG   GenerativeSyntaxModels   DependencyStructure   DeepSyntax   ParseQuality   ParallelTreebanks   SyntacticCoherence LinguisticProblems   UnknownWords   Morphology   GeneratingRichMorphology   FactoredTranslationModels   Compounds   TranslatingTenseCaseMarkers   TranslatingChunksAndClauses   DocumentLevelAspects   Transliteration     TransliterationWithFSM     TransliterationWithOtherMethods     ForwardTransliteration     TransliterationTrainingData     IntegratingTransliteration   SyntacticPrereordering   POSChunkPrereordering   SyntacticReranking   IntegratingSyntacticFeatures LanguageModels   NGramLanguageModels   TargetedLanguageModels   MorphologicalLanguageModels   VeryLargeLanguageModels Decoding   StackDecoding   ReorderingConstraints   WordBasedDecoding   FiniteStateMachines   DecodingComplexity   SyntaxModelDecoding Evaluation   EvaluationCampaigns   ManualMetrics   TaskBasedMetrics   EditRateMetrics   NGramMetrics   SyntaxBasedMetrics   CorrelationOfMetrics   TrainedMetrics   TranslationDifficulty   StatisticalSignificance MachineLearning   WordGraphs   ParameterTuning   Reranking   LargeScaleDiscriminativeTraining   MinimumBayesRisk   ConfidenceMeasures   SystemCombination   IncrementalUpdating NeuralNetworkModels   NeuralLanguageModels   AttentionModel   Training   Inference   Coverage   Vocabulary   Embeddings   MultilingualWordEmbeddings   MonolingualData   Adaptation   LinguisticAnnotation   MultilingualMultimodalMultitask   AlternativeArchitectures   AnalysisAndVisualization   NeuralComponentsInStatisticalMachineTranslation add

  

  @InProceedings{cancedda:2012:ACL2012short,
  author = {Cancedda, Nicola},
  title = {Private Access to Phrase Tables for Statistical Machine Translation},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 50th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)},
  month = {July},
  address = {Jeju Island, Korea},
  publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics},
  pages = {23--27},
  url = {http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P12-2005},
  year = 2012
  }
  Cancedda (2012)
• Harold L. Somers (1992): Current research in Machine Translation, Machine Translation

  DELETEIntroduction   ResearchGroups   AvailableSoftware   SpeechTranslation   SignLanguage   ComputerAidedTranslation   OtherApproaches   Deployment Data   ParallelCorpora   ComparableCorpora   Dictionaries   CorpusCleaning   SentenceAlignment   Truecasing   WordSegmentation   SpellingCorrection   SparseData   PivotLanguages   DomainAdaptation WordBasedModels   IBMModels   Symmetrization   WordAlignment     WordAlignmentBasedOnCoocurrence     WordAlignmentWithLinguisticAnnotation     WordAlignmentForSyntaxBasedModels     DiscriminativeWordAlignment     WordAlignmentCombination     WordAlignmentEvaluation     AlignmentOfSubsententialUnits   DictionariesFromComparableCorpora   LexicalChoice   MTWithoutWordAlignment PhraseBasedModels   PhraseBasedModelTraining   PhraseBasedModelEM   PhraseBasedModelRefinement   ContextFeatures   Smoothing   Paraphrasing   PruningLargeModels   SuffixArrays   ReorderingModels   PhraseBasedVsEBMT SyntaxBasedModels   InversionTransductionGrammars   HierarchicalModels   StringToTree   TreeToString   TreeToTree   BinarizingSCFG   GenerativeSyntaxModels   DependencyStructure   DeepSyntax   ParseQuality   ParallelTreebanks   SyntacticCoherence LinguisticProblems   UnknownWords   Morphology   GeneratingRichMorphology   FactoredTranslationModels   Compounds   TranslatingTenseCaseMarkers   TranslatingChunksAndClauses   DocumentLevelAspects   Transliteration     TransliterationWithFSM     TransliterationWithOtherMethods     ForwardTransliteration     TransliterationTrainingData     IntegratingTransliteration   SyntacticPrereordering   POSChunkPrereordering   SyntacticReranking   IntegratingSyntacticFeatures LanguageModels   NGramLanguageModels   TargetedLanguageModels   MorphologicalLanguageModels   VeryLargeLanguageModels Decoding   StackDecoding   ReorderingConstraints   WordBasedDecoding   FiniteStateMachines   DecodingComplexity   SyntaxModelDecoding Evaluation   EvaluationCampaigns   ManualMetrics   TaskBasedMetrics   EditRateMetrics   NGramMetrics   SyntaxBasedMetrics   CorrelationOfMetrics   TrainedMetrics   TranslationDifficulty   StatisticalSignificance MachineLearning   WordGraphs   ParameterTuning   Reranking   LargeScaleDiscriminativeTraining   MinimumBayesRisk   ConfidenceMeasures   SystemCombination   IncrementalUpdating NeuralNetworkModels   NeuralLanguageModels   AttentionModel   Training   Inference   Coverage   Vocabulary   Embeddings   MultilingualWordEmbeddings   MonolingualData   Adaptation   LinguisticAnnotation   MultilingualMultimodalMultitask   AlternativeArchitectures   AnalysisAndVisualization   NeuralComponentsInStatisticalMachineTranslation add

  

  @article{MTJ:1992:Somers,
  author = {Harold L. Somers},
  title = {Current research in Machine Translation},
  pages = {231--246},
  journal = {Machine Translation},
  volume = {7},
  number = {4},
  month = {December},
  year = 1992
  }
  Somers (1992)
• Kenneth W. Church and Eduard H. Hovy (1993): Good applications for crummy machine translation, Machine Translation

  DELETEIntroduction   ResearchGroups   AvailableSoftware   SpeechTranslation   SignLanguage   ComputerAidedTranslation   OtherApproaches   Deployment Data   ParallelCorpora   ComparableCorpora   Dictionaries   CorpusCleaning   SentenceAlignment   Truecasing   WordSegmentation   SpellingCorrection   SparseData   PivotLanguages   DomainAdaptation WordBasedModels   IBMModels   Symmetrization   WordAlignment     WordAlignmentBasedOnCoocurrence     WordAlignmentWithLinguisticAnnotation     WordAlignmentForSyntaxBasedModels     DiscriminativeWordAlignment     WordAlignmentCombination     WordAlignmentEvaluation     AlignmentOfSubsententialUnits   DictionariesFromComparableCorpora   LexicalChoice   MTWithoutWordAlignment PhraseBasedModels   PhraseBasedModelTraining   PhraseBasedModelEM   PhraseBasedModelRefinement   ContextFeatures   Smoothing   Paraphrasing   PruningLargeModels   SuffixArrays   ReorderingModels   PhraseBasedVsEBMT SyntaxBasedModels   InversionTransductionGrammars   HierarchicalModels   StringToTree   TreeToString   TreeToTree   BinarizingSCFG   GenerativeSyntaxModels   DependencyStructure   DeepSyntax   ParseQuality   ParallelTreebanks   SyntacticCoherence LinguisticProblems   UnknownWords   Morphology   GeneratingRichMorphology   FactoredTranslationModels   Compounds   TranslatingTenseCaseMarkers   TranslatingChunksAndClauses   DocumentLevelAspects   Transliteration     TransliterationWithFSM     TransliterationWithOtherMethods     ForwardTransliteration     TransliterationTrainingData     IntegratingTransliteration   SyntacticPrereordering   POSChunkPrereordering   SyntacticReranking   IntegratingSyntacticFeatures LanguageModels   NGramLanguageModels   TargetedLanguageModels   MorphologicalLanguageModels   VeryLargeLanguageModels Decoding   StackDecoding   ReorderingConstraints   WordBasedDecoding   FiniteStateMachines   DecodingComplexity   SyntaxModelDecoding Evaluation   EvaluationCampaigns   ManualMetrics   TaskBasedMetrics   EditRateMetrics   NGramMetrics   SyntaxBasedMetrics   CorrelationOfMetrics   TrainedMetrics   TranslationDifficulty   StatisticalSignificance MachineLearning   WordGraphs   ParameterTuning   Reranking   LargeScaleDiscriminativeTraining   MinimumBayesRisk   ConfidenceMeasures   SystemCombination   IncrementalUpdating NeuralNetworkModels   NeuralLanguageModels   AttentionModel   Training   Inference   Coverage   Vocabulary   Embeddings   MultilingualWordEmbeddings   MonolingualData   Adaptation   LinguisticAnnotation   MultilingualMultimodalMultitask   AlternativeArchitectures   AnalysisAndVisualization   NeuralComponentsInStatisticalMachineTranslation add

  

  @article{MTJ:1993:Church,
  author = {Kenneth W. Church and Eduard H. Hovy},
  title = {Good applications for crummy machine translation},
  url = {http://www.isi.edu/natural-language/people/hovy/papers/93churchhovy.pdf},
  googlescholar = {5948636947149730470},
  pages = {239--258},
  journal = {Machine Translation},
  volume = {8},
  number = {4},
  month = {December},
  year = 1993
  }
  Church and Hovy (1993)