12 December 2007, Computational Linguistics Seminar, Philipp Koehn

Machine translation is more relevant than ever, especially in a European Union with 23 official languages. What will happen to languages such as Dutch? Will it survive as a language of commerce, or will it be abandoned in favour of English? By lowering translation costs, we would expect to systain the viability of a commercial zone that uses so many different languages. Statistical machine translation holds the promise of instant machine translation. Given open source tools such the Moses decoder, just add a parallel corpus and you have a machine translation system. This talk will present some problems where the standard phrase-based approach fails, and where attention to the specifics of the languages involved is required. I will present methods that deal with different word order, morphology and agglutinative compounding.

For more information and abstracts, see http://www.illc.uva.nl/LaCo/CLS/