Understanding neural machine translation

Now that we have an appreciation for how machine translation has evolved over time, let’s try to understand how state-of-the-art NMT works. First, we will take a look at the model architecture used by neural machine translators and then move on to understanding the actual training algorithm.

Intuition behind NMT systems

First, let’s understand the intuition underlying an NMT system’s design. Say you are a fluent English and German speaker and were asked to translate the following sentence into German:

I went home

This sentence translates to the following:

Ich ging nach Hause

Although it might not have taken more than a few seconds for a fluent person to translate this, there is a certain process that produces the translation. First, you read the English sentence, and then you create a thought or concept about what this sentence represents or implies, in your mind. And finally, you translate the sentence...