language: en

The Candide System for Machine Translation

Adam L. Berger, Peter F. Brown , Stephen A. Della Pietra, Vincent J. Della Pietra, John R. Gillett, John D. Lafferty, Robert L. Mercer, Harry Printz, Lubos Ures
IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center
P.O. Box 704 Yorktown Heights, NY 10598

ABSTRACT 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.

1. Introduction