The Five-Minute Linguist - Bite-sized Essays on Language and Languages Third Edition - Caroline Myrick
55. How Good is Machine Translation?
The Five-Minute Linguist - Bite-sized Essays on Language and Languages Third Edition - Caroline Myrick
Kevin Knight [+]
University of Southern California
Kevin Knight is Research Professor, Computer Science Department, University of Southern California.
Description
Automatic translation of human languages has been a challenge for artificial intelligence since the 1950s. Around 2010, translation software suddenly reached usable quality levels and began processing billions of words per day, including speech and text. The main breakthrough has been programming machines to learn translation rules autonomously from large quantities of human-translated material. Still, systems can only translate a fraction of the world's languages.