Idea of Neural Machine Translation

Automatic translation has been a popular and challenging task for a long time now. The flexibility and ambiguity of the human language make it still one of the most difficult tasks to implement. The same word or phrase can have different meanings depending on the context and, often, there might not be just one correct translation, but many possible ways to translate the same sentence. So, how can a computer learn to translate text from one language into another? Different approaches have been introduced over the years, all with the same goal: to automatically translate sentences or text from a source language into a target language.

The development of automatic translation systems started in the early 1970s with Rule-Based Machine Translation (RBMT). Here, automatic translation was implemented through hand-developed rules and dictionaries by specialized linguists at the lexical, syntactic, and semantic levels of sentences.

In the 1990s, statistical...