The Journey of Machine Translation: Taking the Scenic Route
Josef van Genabith (DFKI and Saarland University)
In this talk I'll trace the journey of machine translation along a "scenic route" with stops at key landmarks including rule-based, statistical and neural approaches. The talk will concentrate on some of the leading ideas and intuitions underlying the approaches along with some practical considerations that are important in building language technology systems that scale to "real" applications. Even though the level of true technical detail will be limited, the journey will cover a lot of ground and, at times, seem like a whistle stop tour.