Overview of machine translation
There are different types of machine translation methods that are in use, but for conciseness, we will look into two of the main approaches. One of them is statistical machine translation (SMT) and the other is neural machine translation (NMT), which is the topic of this chapter. We will briefly look at these two methods.
Statistical machine translation
Statistical machine translation combines a translation model with a target language model to convert sentences from the source text in one language to sentences in the target language. This is illustrated in the following diagram. The translation model maps words and phrases from the source language to the target language. The language model captures statistics of how likely words follow a specific sequence in the target language. SMT, therefore, tries to maximize the probability of choosing a target sentence that is the translation of the source sentence. These statistical models are derived from a large corpus...