Natural language research announcements

["Schwartz, Lane Oscar Bingaman" <lanes AT illinois.edu>]

Introduction to Statistical Machine Translation

In Spring 2015, a new special topics course (LING 506) will be offered, covering the algorithms and techniques used in modern statistical machine translation systems.

Google translate instantly translates between any pair of over eighty human languages like French and English. How does it do that? Why does it make the errors that it does? And how can you build something better? Modern translation systems like Google Translate,
 Bing Translator, and SDL FreeTranslation learn to translate by reading millions of words of already translated text. This course will show you how they work. We cover fundamental building blocks from linguistics, machine learning, algorithms, data structures,
 and formal language theory, showing how they apply to a difficult real-word artificial intelligence problem 

Prerequisite: LING 406 and an introductory level Computer Science programming course, or CS 447, or consent of instructor.

The class will meet on Tuesdays & Thursdays, from 12:30-1:50 PM, taught by Lane Schwartz, Assistant Professor in Linguistics.

Questions should be directed to lanes AT illinois.edu.