UMass Machine Learning and Friends Lunch | Main / Large-scale Machine Translation At Google

Jay Ponte (UMass CS Alum, Ph.D. '98)

Thanks to the internet, the ability to communicate over long distances, across social groups, in spite of political boundaries and without regard to time zones has never been better but one barrier that persists is language. Machine Translation services on the Internet are used by millions of people every day and while the quality often leaves much to be desired, many users find these translations useful and even essential. If we can significantly improve the quality of MT, it will enable communication and information exchange across language boundaries on a scale never imagined even a few years ago.

At Google, we started a research project to do exactly that in 2003. By 2005, we were participating in the annual MT evaluation conducted by NIST and, in 2006, we launched our world class translation system on Google.com. In this talk, we will look at the challenges of building a world class MT system and making it available to the world and at recent work to improve translation quality.