Defining machine translation
Vaswani et al. (2017) tackled one of the most difficult NLP problems when designing the Transformer. The human baseline for machine translation seems out of reach for us human-machine intelligence designers. This did not stop Vaswani et al. (2017) from publishing the Transformer’s architecture and achieving state-of-the-art BLEU results.
In this section, we will define machine translation. Machine translation is the process of reproducing human translation by machine transductions and outputs:
Figure 6.1: Machine translation process
The general idea in Figure 6.1 is for the machine to do the following in a few steps:
- Choose a sentence to translate
- Learn how words relate to each other with hundreds of millions of parameters
- Learn the many ways in which words refer to each other
- Use machine transduction to transfer the learned parameters to new sequences
- Choose a candidate translation for a word...