ColloquiaTalk by Jessie Pinkham, Microsoft Research - 2/28/02

[Margery Ishmael]

Computer Science Department

Date: Thursday, February 28, 2002
Time:	3:00 p.m.
Place: Ryerson 277 (annex)

Speaker: Jessie Pinkham of Microsoft Research

Title: MSR-MT: a data-driven approach to machine translation of natural 
language

Abstract:
First tackled in the 1950's, machine translation (MT) has been a 
long-standing problem in natural language processing.  The best commercial 
software for MT relies on a large bilingual lexical database combined with 
hand-written rules that map patterns of the source language into the target 
language.  We take instead a hybrid data-driven approach, which combines 
rule-based linguistic analysis with statistical, example-based and other 
machine learning techniques, using aligned bilingual texts as the source of 
transfer information. We learn both lexical translations and transfer 
patterns from the bilingual training data, enabling both domain 
customization and rapid creation of new language pairs.  Evaluation of test 
results show, that in a technical domain, our system surpasses the quality 
of the best commercial systems.  http://research.microsoft.com/users/jessiep/


*The talk will be followed by refreshments in Ryerson 255*
Persons with disabilities who may need assistance, please call 773.834.8977

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Margery Ishmael
Secretary to the Chairman, Department of Computer Science
The University of Chicago
1100 E. 58th Street, Chicago, IL. 60637-1581
tel. 773.834.8977  fax. 773.702.8487
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