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 how they work. We cover fundamental building blocks from linguistics, machine learning, algorithms, data structures, and formal language theory, showing how they apply to a difficult real-word artificial intelligence problem.
- Instructor
- Lane Schwartz - Office hours Wednesdays 3-4 PM in Foreign Languages Building, room 4019, and by appointment
- Time and place
- Tuesdays and Thursdays 3:30-4:50pm, Illini Hall room 23
- 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.
Supplemental texts:
- The Linux Command Line: A Complete Introduction by William E. Shotts, Jr.
- git - the simple guide by Roger Dudler
- Pro Git
- Learn Version Control with Git: A step-by-step course for the complete beginner by fournova Software GmbH
- Learning Python, 5th edition by Mark Lutz
- Python for Kids: A Playful Introduction to Programming by Jason Briggs