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...