A brief historical tour of machine translation

Here, we will discuss the history of MT. The inception of MT involved rule-based systems. Then, more statistically sound MT systems emerged. Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) used various measures of statistics of a language to produce translations to another language. Then came the era of NMT. NMT currently holds state-of-the-art performance in most machine learning tasks compared with other methods.

Rule-based translation

NMT came long after statistical machine learning, and statistical machine learning has been around for more than half a century now. The inception of SMT methods dates back to 1950-60, when during one of the first recorded projects, the Georgetown-IBM experiment, more than 60 Russian sentences were translated to English. o give some perspective, this attempt is almost as old as the invention of the transistor.

One of the initial techniques for MT was word-based machine translation. This system performed...