A brief historical tour of machine translation

Here we will discuss the history of MT. The inception of MT involved rule-based systems. Then, more statistically sound MT systems emerged. An Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) used various measures of statistics of a language to produce translations to another language. Then came the era of NMT. NMT currently holds the state of the art performance in most machine learning tasks compared with other methods.

Rule-based translation

NMT came long after statistical machine learning, and statistical machine learning has been around for more than half a century now. The inception of SMT methods dates back to 1950-60, when during one of the first recorded projects, the Georgetown-IBM experiment, more than 60 Russian sentences were translated to English.

One of the initial techniques for MT was word-based machine translation. This system performed word-to-word translations using bilingual dictionaries. However, as you can imagine, this method has serious...