703 papers · page 1 of 29 · the most cited first · all topics
Translating text from one language to another by program.
What it is
Machine translation, MT for short, translates text from one language to another by program. The first systems were rules written by hand: dictionaries and grammars of transfer from one language's structure to another's, or an interlingua that belongs to no language. Statistical systems then learned translation tables from aligned texts, and neural networks now translate whole sentences at once.
Translation is hard because languages cut the world differently: words have no exact match, word order changes, and style matters as much as meaning. Systems are measured with people's judgments and with automatic scores such as BLEU that compare the output with human translations.
How Mova does it
Mova translates without a neural network: a text is read down its language's stack into a tree, frames and a world, then into a meta-world that belongs to no language, and written out by the target language's encoder with the target author's delta. The test is byte for byte on verse-aligned Bibles, and what is lost is measured in bits at every stage.