Schedule and Readings

The Tower of Babel

Schedule is subject to change

Week	Date	Topic	Readings (★=graduate level; ⓘ=recommended supplemental)
1	Jan 17	Course overview and required tools	Wikibooks.org, LaTeX - How to get help Wikibooks.org, LaTeX - Basics Oetiker, et al, The Not So Short Introduction to LaTeX 2e (Ch. 1 and Ch. 2 (skip 2.5.1-2.5.7)) Wikibooks.org, LaTeX - Document Structure Wikibooks.org, LaTeX - Bibliography management - BibTeX
1	Jan 19	Introduction to Machine Translation	Lewis-Kraus, Is Translation an Art or a Math Problem? Greene, Language: Finding a voice Le & Schuster, A Neural Network for Machine Translation, at Production Scale Schuster et al, Zero-Shot Translation with Google’s Multilingual Neural MT System
2	Jan 24	Universal Language in the 17th century	Schwartz, Video Lecture Okrent, Pangloss Regained Descartes, Letter to Mersenne, 20 November 1629 (p. 6-8) Foer, Utopian for Beginners ★ Wilkins, An Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language (Ch. 1.5) ★ Swift, Gulliver's Travels (Ch. 3.5) ⓘ Couturat, The Logic of Leibniz (Ch. 3) ⓘ Wilkins, An Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language (Ch. 2.1) ⓘ NPR, The Unsuccessful Quest for a Universal Language ⓘ Bigham, Video Lecture: Constructed & Invented Languages ⓘ Dalarna University, Video Lecture: The Universal Language (part 3) ⓘ Heinlein, Gulf ⓘ Gode, Interlingua ⓘ Seargeant, Why Tolkien’s fantastic imaginary languages have had more impact than Esperanto
2	Jan 26	Machine Translation in the 1930s	Hutchins, The history of machine translation in a nutshell Hutchins, Two precursors of machine translation - Artsrouni and Trojanskij
3	Jan 31	Machine Translation in the 1940s	Hutchins, Milestones in MT - How it all began in 1947 and 1948 Weaver & Wiener, Correspondence Weaver & Prager, Correspondence Hutchins, Milestones in MT - Warren Weaver's 1949 memorandum Weaver, Translation
3	Feb 02	1948-1950 The Noisy Channel Model	Schwartz, Video Lecture (The Noisy Channel Model) Weaver, The Mathematics of Communications ⓘ Chiu, et al, Mathematical Theory of Claude Shannon ★ Shannon, A Mathematical Theory of Communication
4	Feb 07	1951-1952 - Academic MT Research Begins	Hutchins, Milestones in MT - Bar-Hillel's survey Bar-Hillel, The Present State of Research on Mechanical Translation Hutchins, Milestones in MT - The first machine translation conference ⓘ Reifler, The First Conference on Mechanical Translation
4	Feb 09	1954-1966 The Decade of Optimism	Hutchins, Milestones in MT - The IBM-Georgetown Demonstration Welt im Bild, Newscast from 26 January 1954 (03:35-04:20 in the video) New York Times, Russian is turned into English by a fast electronic translator New York Herald Tribune, Electronic Linguistics Toronto Globe and Mail, Electronic Translations Possible in Five Years ⓘ IBM Press Release, 701 Translator Hutchins, Milestones in MT - Bar-Hillel and the nonfeasibility of FAHQT Bar-Hillel, The Present Status of Automatic Translation of Languages ★ Yngve, Sentence-for-sentence translation ⓘ Parker-Rhodes, An Electronic Computer Program for Translating Chinese into English King, Stochastic Methods of Mechanical Translation
5	Feb 14	1966 - The ALPAC Report	Hutchins, ALPAC - the (in)famous report ALPAC, Language and Machines - Computers in Translation and Linguistics (p. 1-35)
5	Feb 16	Approaches to MT: The Vauquois Triangle	Vauquois, Automatic Translation - A Survey of Different Approaches Hutchins & Somers, An Introduction to machine translation (Ch. 4) ⓘ Dorr, et al, A Survey of Current Paradigms in Machine Translation
6	Feb 21	Interlingual Machine Translation	Delavenay, "Languages, Interlanguage, and Metalanguage", Ch. 4.1 of "An Introduction to Machine Translation" (p. 46-54) Melby, The Possibility of Language (p. 43-49)
6	Feb 23	AI and the Turing Test	Turing, Computing Machinery and Intelligence Morber, If software looks like a brain and acts like a brain—will we treat it like one? ⓘ Weizenbaum, ELIZA
7	Feb 28	The Chinese Room	Searle, Minds, Brains, and Programs (p. 417-423) ★ Abelson, et al, Peer Commentary to Minds, Brains, and Programs (p. 423-450) Searle, Author's Response to Peer Commentary to Minds, Brains, and Programs (p. 450-456) ⓘ Searle, Chinese room argument ⓘ Searle, Consciousness in Artificial Intelligence - Guest lecture at Google
7	Mar 02	Exam review	Hutchins, "The whisky was invisible", or Persistent myths of MT
8	Mar 07	No class
8	Mar 09	Mid-term Exam
9	Mar 14	MT in the U.S. Government	NSA, GISTER Reeder, At Your Service: Embedded MT As a Service Pedtke, U.S. Government Support and Use of Machine Translation: Current Status
9	Mar 16	No class
10	Mar 21	Spring Break
10	Mar 23	Spring Break
11	Mar 28	Statistical Word-Based MT	Koehn, "Word-Based Models", Ch. 4.0-4.1 of "Statistical Machine Translation" (p. 81-87) ★ Brown, et al, A Statistical Approach to Language Translation
11	Mar 30	Statistical Phrase-Based MT	Koehn, "Phrase-Based Models", Ch. 5.0-5.2 of "Statistical Machine Translation" (p. 127-136) ★ Koehn, et al, Statistical Phrase-Based Translation
12	Apr 04	Decoding	Koehn, "Decoding", Ch. 6.0-6.2 of "Statistical Machine Translation" (p. 155-167)
12	Apr 06	Language Models	Koehn, "Language Models", Ch. 7.0-7.2 of "Statistical Machine Translation" (p. 181-196)
13	Apr 11	Tree-Based Models	Koehn, "Tree-Based Models", Ch. 11.0-11.2 of "Statistical Machine Translation" (p. 331-346)
13	Apr 13	Free MT on the Internet	Yang & Lange, SYSTRAN on AltaVista: A User Study on Real-Time Machine Translation on the Internet Och, Statistical machine translation live Gaspari & Hutchins, Online and Free! Ten Years of Online Machine Translation: Origins, Developments, Current Use and Future Prospects
14	Apr 18	MT at Autodesk	Plitt & Masselot, A Productivity Test of Statistical Machine Translation Post-Editing in a Typical Localization Context
14	Apr 20	Evaluating Machine Translation	Hutchins, Has machine translation improved? Some historical comparisons Miller, et al, Some Psychological Methods for Evaluating the Quality of Translations Papineni, et al, BLEU - A Method for Automatic Evaluation of Machine Translation
15	Apr 25	The Future of MT	Och, 51 Languages in Google Translate Bright, Skype Translator is the most futuristic thing I've ever used
15	Apr 27	Exam review
16	May 02	Final exam