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CJS Noon Lecture Series: Challenges for English->Japanese Machine Translation

Thursday, February 26, 2015
5:00 AM
Room 1636, School of Social Work Building

Takako Aikawa began teaching Japanese at MIT as a Senior Lecturer from September of 2013.  She received her PhD in Japanese linguistics from Ohio State University in 1993.  Prior to MIT, she worked for Microsoft Research as a computational linguist and a program manager.

Abstract: This lecture addresses challenges that machine translation faces in translating English into Japanese.  First, I will provide a brief history of the development of machine translation and explain how a machine can learn mappings between two languages automatically.  Second, I will present problems for machine translation in general.  Third, I will tackle the question of why the English -> Japanese translation is so hard for machine translation while presenting some linguistic differences between the two languages.  Last, I will discuss various types of research that have been done to improve the quality of English->Japanese machine translation.

Speaker:
Takako Aikawa, Senior Lecturer in Japanese, Massachusetts Institute of Technology