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, Bing Translator, and SDL FreeTranslation learn to translate by reading millions of words of already translated text.

This course will show you the rich history behind these systems, and what MT can be used for today.

Instructor

Lane Schwartz - Office hours Wednesdays 3-4 PM in Foreign Languages Building, room 4019, and by appointment

Time and place

Tuesdays and Thursdays 2:00-3:20pm, 1203 1/2 W. Nevada Street Computer Lab

Textbook

Statistical Machine Translation (errata) by Philipp Koehn You can purchase the Statistical Machine Translation textbook from Amazon, or access it online through the UIUC library.