A statistical approach to French/English translation

Abstract

In this paper we will outline an approach to automatic translation that utilizes techniques of statistical information extraction from large data bases. These self-organizing techniques have proven successful in the field of automatic speech recognition [1,2,3]. Statistical approaches have also been used recently in lexicography [4] and natural language processing [3,5,6]. The idea of automatic translation by statistical (information theoretic) methods was proposed many years ago by Warren Weaver [7].