Machine Translation/Statistics

=Statistical machine translation=

Language models
Language models are used in MT for a) scoring arbitrary sequences of words (tokens) and b) given a sequence of tokens, they predict what token will likely to follow the sequence. Formally, language models are probability distributions over sequences of tokens in a given language.

Character-based models
Recently, it was shown that it is possible to use sub-words, characters or even bytes as basic units for language modelling. There are a few events focused particularly on such models and in general, processing language data on sub-word units, e.g. SCLem 2017.