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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: