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.