Statistical Machine Translation

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.

Philipp Koehn is a lecturer in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. He is the scientific co-ordinator of the European EuroMatrix project and also involved in research funded by DARPA in the USA. He has also collaborated with leading companies in the field, such as Systran and Asia Online. He implemented the widely used decoder Pharoah, and is leading the development of the open source machine translation toolkit Moses.