Machine Translation
This is a gentle introduction to the vast field, intended primarily for students
without computational background.
The course will provide basic understanding of the ideas behind a traditional
rule-based MT system, including a few elementary notions of modern theoretical
and computational linguistics.
More recent system designs, interacting with the user and/or based on bilingual
corpora, will be presented as answers to the extreme costs necessary to build a
fully automatic rule-based system of broader coverage and reasonable quality.
As far as possible, systems representative of each category will be
demonstrated, including a Translation Memory tool.
Finally, we will discuss suggestions how systems can be evaluated vis-a-vis user
needs.
Students are encouraged to present their own research in one of the following
topics: MT systems currently available, experience of a demo version user,
implementation of a toy MT system, etc.