Box: The common language of statistics
The machine translation revolution began 20 years ago, when a research group at IBM introduced a technique based on statistical analysis. Previous attempts at translation had focused on encoding linguistic knowledge as rules for the computer to follow. But for this new approach, dubbed statistical machine translation (SMT), almost no linguistic knowledge was needed.
Instead, the SMT system searched a large collection of texts, each of which was in two different languages, searching for statistical patterns that indicate the presence of words and phrases with the same meaning. Google and other translation companies use similar SMT systems today.
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