The International Macintosh Users Group presents:

            Challenges in Machine Translation

Group:      International Macintosh Users Group (IMUG)
                 (A Forum for Multilingual / Multiscript Computing)
Date:       April 19, 2007, 7-9 p.m.
Speaker:    Dr. Franz Josef Och (Senior Staff Research Scientist, Google Research)
Topic:      Challenges in Machine Translation
Location:   Apple Computer, Apple Campus, 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino
                 Take Saratoga/Sunnyvale exit off 280, turn South into
                 Cupertino, turn left onto Mariani Avenue, left into
                 Infinite Loop. Meeting is held in the Singapore Room.
                 Please arrive by 7:10, as the door is not monitored
                 after this time.
Admission:  $4; free for IMUG members
Contact:    Roger Sherman, (650) 859-5981
                 roger [dot] sherman [at] sri [dot] com
Website:   http://www.imug.org

In recent years there has been an enormous boom in MT research. There has been not only an increase in the number of research groups in the field and in the amount of funding, but there is now also optimism for the future of the field and for achieving even better quality. The major reason for this change has been a paradigm shift away from linguistic/rule-based methods towards empirical/data-driven methods in MT. This has been made possible by the availability of large amounts of training data and large computational resources. This paradigm shift towards empirical methods has fundamentally changed the way MT research is done. The field faces new challenges. For achieving optimal MT quality, we want to train models on as much data as possible, ideally language models trained on hundreds of billions of words and translation models trained on hundreds of millions of words. Doing that requires very large computational resources, a corresponding software infrastructure, and a focus on systems building and engineering. In addition to discussing those challenges in MT research, the talk will also give specific examples on how some of the data challenges are being dealt with at Google Research.

[No bio submitted, but for an interview with the speaker, see this Reuters story.]

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