Machine Translation

Machine Translation was one of the declared highlights and focal points of the Human Language Technology Workshop. Machine Translation, or MT for short, has seen a renaissance in recent years, brought about by the availability of faster and more powerful computing, and several decades of advances in speech and language processing. ARPA now sponsors a machine translation initiative and companies and governments, domestic and overseas, view it as a growth area and devote significant efforts to this problem. Indeed, as nations are growing increasingly intertwined with each other, and as economies, defense, travel, and the media grow increasingly internationalized and globalized, handling and overcoming language barriers effectively, becomes an ever more pressing issue.