Using bilingual Web data to mine and rank translations

The English Reading Wizard uses bilingual Web and local-dictionary data to help readers understand foreign languages by translating words and phrases. Methods include the expectation maximization algorithm and bilingual bootstrapping.

English Reading Wizard

Full machine translation has made substantial achievements, but its quality hasn't reached a satisfactory level. Figure 1 shows such a system's Chinese-to-English translation. English speakers can get a rough sense of what the original Chinese text describes, but they'll probably have difficulties understanding the details. (For an example machine translation system, see Babelfish, http://babelfish.altavista.com.) Figure 1.

Example Chinese-to-English results from a full machine-translation system.