I will discuss the state of the art in automatic translation between human languages, showing how models of translation can be learned usding statistics over large amounts of parallel, bilingual text. The general formalism of synchronous context-free grammars, which generate stings in two languages simultaneously, can be used to describe a number of recent systems. I will present recent work on the theoretical complexity of translation with synchronous context-free grammars, as well as practical algorithms for efficient MT in this framework.
Colloquia Series page.