Statistical Machine Translation

Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) deals with automati cally mapping sentences in one human language (for example French) into another huma n language (such as English). The first language is called the source and the second language is called the target. This process can be thought of as a stochastic process. Ther e are many SMT variants, depending upon how translation is modelled. S ome approaches are in terms of a string-to-string mapping, some use trees-to-s trings, and some use treeto-tree models. All share in common the central idea that tra nslation is automatic, with models estimated from parallel corpora (source-targe t pairs) and also from monolingual corpora (examples of target sentences).