Schedule and Readings

The Tower of Babel

Schedule is subject to change

Week	Date	Topic	Readings (=graduate level; =optional)
1	Jan 19	Introduction to Machine Translation	Lewis-Kraus, Is Translation an Art or a Math Problem?
1	Jan 21	Universal Language in the 17th century	Schwartz, Video Lecture Okrent, Pangloss Regained Descartes, Letter to Mersenne, 20 November 1629 (p. 6-8) Wilkins, An Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language (Ch. 1.5) Swift, Gulliver's Travels (Ch. 3.5) Couturat, The Logic of Leibniz (Ch. 3) Wilkins, An Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language (Ch. 2.1) NPR, The Unsuccessful Quest for a Universal Language
2	Jan 26	Constructed languages in the 18th-21st centuries	Foer, Utopian for Beginners Bigham, Video Lecture: Constructed & Invented Languages Dalarna University, Video Lecture: The Universal Language (part 3) Heinlein, Gulf Gode, Interlingua
2	Jan 28	Machine Translation in the 1930s	Hutchins, The history of machine translation in a nutshell Hutchins, Two precursors of machine translation - Artsrouni and Trojanskij
3	Feb 02	Machine Translation in the 1940s	Hutchins, Milestones in MT - How it all began in 1947 and 1948 Weaver & Wiener, Correspondence Weaver & Prager, Correspondence Hutchins, Milestones in MT - Warren Weaver's 1949 memorandum Weaver, Translation
3	Feb 04	1948-1950 The Noisy Channel Model	Schwartz, Video Lecture (The Noisy Channel Model) Weaver, The Mathematics of Communications Chiu, et al, Mathematical Theory of Claude Shannon Shannon, A Mathematical Theory of Communication
4	Feb 09	1951-1952 - Academic MT Research Begins	Hutchins, Milestones in MT - Bar-Hillel's survey Bar-Hillel, The Present State of Research on Mechanical Translation Hutchins, Milestones in MT - The first machine translation conference Reifler, The First Conference on Mechanical Translation
4	Feb 11	1954 - MT Meets the Public	Hutchins, Milestones in MT - The IBM-Georgetown Demonstration Welt im Bild, Newscast from 26 January 1954 (03:35-04:20 in the video) New York Times, Russian is turned into English by a fast electronic translator New York Herald Tribune, Electronic Linguistics Toronto Globe and Mail, Electronic Translations Possible in Five Years IBM Press Release, 701 Translator
5	Feb 16	1954-1966 The Decade of Optimism	Hutchins, Milestones in MT - Bar-Hillel and the nonfeasibility of FAHQT Bar-Hillel, The Present Status of Automatic Translation of Languages Yngve, Sentence-for-sentence translation Parker-Rhodes, An Electronic Computer Program for Translating Chinese into English King, Stochastic Methods of Mechanical Translation
5	Feb 18	1966 - The ALPAC Report	Hutchins, ALPAC - the (in)famous report ALPAC, Language and Machines - Computers in Translation and Linguistics (p. 1-35)
6	Feb 23	Approaches to MT: The Vauquois Triangle	Vauquois, Automatic Translation - A Survey of Different Approaches Hutchins & Somers, An Introduction to machine translation (Ch. 4) Dorr, et al, A Survey of Current Paradigms in Machine Translation
6	Feb 25	DARPA LORELEI PI Meeting
7	Mar 01	Interlingual Machine Translation	Delavenay, "Languages, Interlanguage, and Metalanguage", Ch. 4.1 of "An Introduction to Machine Translation" (p. 46-54) Melby, The Possibility of Language (p. 43-49)
7	Mar 03	AI and the Turing Test	Turing, Computing Machinery and Intelligence Weizenbaum, ELIZA
8	Mar 08	The Chinese Room	Searle, Minds, Brains, and Programs (p. 417-423) Abelson, et al, Peer Commentary to Minds, Brains, and Programs (p. 423-450) Searle, Author's Response to Peer Commentary to Minds, Brains, and Programs (p. 450-456) Searle, Chinese room argument Morber, If software looks like a brain and acts like a brain—will we treat it like one?
8	Mar 10	Exam review	Hutchins, "The whisky was invisible", or Persistent myths of MT
9	Mar 15	Mid-term Exam
9	Mar 17	MT in the U.S. Government	NSA, Cryptolog, 1st Issue 1991 (p. 3-7) NSA, Cryptolog, 2nd Issue 1991 (p. 26) Reeder, At Your Service: Embedded MT As a Service Pedtke, U.S. Government Support and Use of Machine Translation: Current Status
10	Mar 22	Spring Break
10	Mar 24	Spring Break
11	Mar 29	Statistical Word-Based MT	Koehn, "Word-Based Models", Ch. 4.0-4.1 of "Statistical Machine Translation" (p. 81-87) Brown, et al, A Statistical Approach to Language Translation
11	Mar 31	Statistical Phrase-Based MT	Koehn, "Phrase-Based Models", Ch. 5.0-5.2 of "Statistical Machine Translation" (p. 127-136) Koehn, et al, Statistical Phrase-Based Translation
12	Apr 05	Decoding	Koehn, "Decoding", Ch. 6.0-6.2 of "Statistical Machine Translation" (p. 155-167)
12	Apr 07	Language Models	Koehn, "Language Models", Ch. 7.0-7.2 of "Statistical Machine Translation" (p. 181-196)
13	Apr 12	Tree-Based Models	Koehn, "Tree-Based Models", Ch. 11.0-11.2 of "Statistical Machine Translation" (p. 331-346)
13	Apr 14	Free MT on the Internet	Yang & Lange, SYSTRAN on AltaVista: A User Study on Real-Time Machine Translation on the Internet Och, Statistical machine translation live Gaspari & Hutchins, Online and Free! Ten Years of Online Machine Translation: Origins, Developments, Current Use and Future Prospects
14	Apr 19	MT at Autodesk	Plitt & Masselot, A Productivity Test of Statistical Machine Translation Post-Editing in a Typical Localization Context
14	Apr 21	Evaluating Machine Translation	Hutchins, Has machine translation improved? Some historical comparisons Miller, et al, Some Psychological Methods for Evaluating the Quality of Translations Papineni, et al, BLEU - A Method for Automatic Evaluation of Machine Translation
15	Apr 26	The Future of MT	Och, 51 Languages in Google Translate Bright, Skype Translator is the most futuristic thing I've ever used
15	Apr 28	Exam review
16	May 03	Final exam