Synonyms
Definition
Statistical machine translation (SMT) deals with automatically mapping sentences in one human language (for example, French) into another human language (such as English). The first language is called the source and the second language is called the target. This process can be thought of as a stochastic process. There are many SMT variants, depending upon how translation is modeled. Some approaches are in terms of a string-to-string mapping, some use trees-to-strings, and some use tree-to-tree models. All share in common the central idea that translation is automatic, with models estimated from parallel corpora (source-target pairs) and also from monolingual corpora (examples of target sentences).
Motivation and Background
Machine Translation has widespread commercial, military, and political applications. For example, increasingly, the Web is accessed by non-English speakers reading non-English pages. The ability to find relevant information clearly should not...
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Recommended Reading
Brown PF, Pietra SD, Pietra VJD, Mercer RL (1994) The mathematic of statistical machine translation: parameter estimation. Comput Linguist 19(2):263–311
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Osborne, M. (2017). Statistical Machine Translation. In: Sammut, C., Webb, G.I. (eds) Encyclopedia of Machine Learning and Data Mining. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-7687-1_783
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-7687-1_783
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