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Statistical machine translation

ACM Computing SurveysPublished 1 August 2008
Adam Lopez
Citations406
SJR quartileQ1
SJR score5.80
SNIP11.03

TL;DR

This survey presents a tutorial overview of the state of the art of statistical machine translation, describing the context of the current research and an overview of the main subproblems: translation modeling, parameter estimation, and decoding.

Abstract

Statistical machine translation (SMT) treats the translation of natural language as a machine learning problem. By examining many samples of human-produced translation, SMT algorithms automatically learn how to translate. SMT has made tremendous strides in less than two decades, and new ideas are constantly introduced. This survey presents a tutorial overview of the state of the art. We describe the context of the current research and then move to a formal problem description and an overview of the main subproblems: translation modeling, parameter estimation, and decoding. Along the way, we present a taxonomy of some different approaches within these areas. We conclude with an overview of evaluation and a discussion of future directions.

Keywords

Computer Science