Machine Translation : From Statistical to modern Deep-learning practices
This is an incremental survey paper for researchers in computational linguistics and machine translation, summarizing existing advancements without introducing new methods.
The paper reviews the evolution of machine translation from statistical methods to deep-learning approaches, highlighting how deep learning has become the dominant method and improved translation efficacy.
Machine translation (MT) is an area of study in Natural Language processing which deals with the automatic translation of human language, from one language to another by the computer. Having a rich research history spanning nearly three decades, Machine translation is one of the most sought after area of research in the linguistics and computational community. In this paper, we investigate the models based on deep learning that have achieved substantial progress in recent years and becoming the prominent method in MT. We shall discuss the two main deep-learning based Machine Translation methods, one at component or domain level which leverages deep learning models to enhance the efficacy of Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) and end-to-end deep learning models in MT which uses neural networks to find correspondence between the source and target languages using the encoder-decoder architecture. We conclude this paper by providing a time line of the major research problems solved by the researchers and also provide a comprehensive overview of present areas of research in Neural Machine Translation.