Machine Translation

What is machine translation (MT)?

Humans often communicate with each other by means of a language, compared to other communication methods (for example, gesturing). Currently, more than 6,000 languages are spoken worldwide. Furthermore, learning a language to a level where it’s easily understandable to a native speaker of that language is a difficult task to master. However, communication is essential for sharing knowledge, socializing, and expanding our network. Therefore, language acts as a barrier to communicating with people in different parts of the world. This is where machine translation (MT) comes in. MT systems allow the user to input a sentence in their own language (known as the source language) and output a sentence in a desired target language.

The problem with MT can be formulated as follows. Say we’re given a sentence (or a sequence of words) $W_s$ belonging to a source language $S$, defined by the following: