Chapter 10. Machine Translation

Philipp Koehn

Machine translation is one of the holy grails of natural language processing. It is a seemingly well-defined task: converting text in one language into another while preserving its meaning. It mirrors a human activity that is done by amateur bilingual speakers and professionals on a daily basis. But at the same time, it is fraught with difficulties so that most researchers do not expect to reach human quality anytime soon. The goal is more modest: producing translations that are good enough or useful.

In recent years, with the advent of the world wide web and the emergence of data-driven methods, machine translation research has received a jolt of new activity and much more visibility. An expanding ...

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