The Candide System for Machine Translation

We present an overview of Candide, a system for automatic translation of French text to English text. Candide uses methods of information theory and statistics to develop a probability model of the translation process. This model, which is made to accord as closely as possible with a large body of French and English sentence pairs, is then used to generate English translations of previously unseen French sentences. This paper provides a tutorial in these methods, discussions of the training and operation of the system, and a summary of test results.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1994
• Where: NAACL
• Authors: Adam L. Berger, Peter F. Brown, Stephen Della Pietra, Vincent J. Della Pietra, John R. Gillett, John D. Lafferty, Robert L. Mercer, Harry Printz, Lubos Ures
• Keywords: Candide Uses Methods, English Sentence Pairs, NAACL 1994, NAACL 2007, Unseen French Sentences