A Statistical Machine Translation Primer

This first chapter is a short introduction to the main aspects of statistical machine translation (SMT). In particular, we cover the issues of automatic evaluation of machine translation output, language modeling, word-based and phrase-based translation models, and the use of syntax in machine translation. We will also do a quick roundup of some more recent directions that we believe may gain importance in the future. We situate statistical machine translation in the general context of machine learning research, and put the emphasis on similarities and differences with standard machine learning problems and practice.