Skip to main content
EN 601.468/668 Machine Translation
Fall 2024
Tuesdays and Thursdays 1:30-2:45
Room: Hodson 210
Computer Science Department
Johns Hopkins University

Google translate instantly translates between any pair of over eighty human languages like French and English. How does it do that? Why does it make the errors that it does? And how can you build something better? Modern translation systems like Google Translate and Bing Translator learn to translate by reading millions of words of already translated text. This course will show you how they work. We cover fundamental building blocks from linguistics, machine learning (especially deep learning), algorithms, and data structures, showing how they apply to a difficult real-word artificial intelligence problem.

Instructor
Philipp Koehn (phi@jhu.edu)
TA
Bismarck Odoom (bodoom1@jhu.edu)
Office hours
Professor by Appointment
TA Bismarck Bamfo Odoom, Wednesday 1-2pm, Malone 122
CAs Lavanya Shankar, Monday 3-4pm; Angad Sandhu, Tuesday 1-2pm; Kshitij Joshi, Friday 2-3pm; Weina Dai, Thursday 2-3pm; Malone 216
Format
This class will be delivered in person this year. Lectures were pre-recorded in 2020 and these are still accessible through links on this web site and on Youtube. Note that a good portion has changed since.
Discussion Forum
Piazza access code: nobxprze2nm ! Gradescope access code: 7EXJ44
Textbooks
The class follows closely two textbooks.
Grading
To understand how machine translation works, you will build a translation system. We will mainly grade hands-on work.
  • Five homework assignments (12% each)
  • Final project (30%)
  • In-class presentation: Language in ten minutes (10%)
Homework Schedule
There will be five homework assignments, tentative schedule:

Late penalty for homework assignments: 10% per day, after 5 free “late days”.