Statistical Machine Translation

The dream of automatic language translation is now closer thanks to recent advances in the techniques that underpin statistical machine translation. This class-tested textbook from an active researcher in the field, provides a clear and careful introduction to the latest methods and explains how to build machine translation systems for any two languages. It introduces the subject's building blocks from linguistics and probability, then covers the major models for machine translation: word-based, phrase-based, and tree-based, as well as machine translation evaluation, language modeling, discriminative training and advanced methods to integrate linguistic annotation. The book also reports the latest research, presents the major outstanding challenges, and enables novices as well as experienced researchers to make novel contributions to this exciting area. Ideal for students at undergraduate and graduate level, or for anyone interested in the latest developments in machine translation.

Preface; Part I. Foundations: 1. Introduction; 2. Words, sentences, corpora; 3. Probability theory; Part II. Core Methods: 4. Word-based models; 5. Phrase-based models; 6. Decoding; 7. Language models; 8. Evaluation; Part III. Advanced Topics: 9. Discriminative training; 10. Integrating linguistic information; 11. Tree-based models; Bibliography; Author index; Index.

Automatic language translation systems like those used by Google, have been revolutionized by recent advances in the methods used in statistical machine translation. This first textbook on the topic explains these innovations carefully and shows the reader, whether a student or a developer, how to build their own translation system.

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.