Natural Language Processing and Its Applications in Machine Translation: A Diachronic Review

As an essential part of artificial intelligence technology, natural language processing is rooted in multiple disciplines such as linguistics, computer science, and mathematics. The rapid advancements in natural language processing provides strong support for machine translation research. This paper first introduces the key concepts and main content of natural language processing, and briefly reviews the history and progress of NLP research at home and abroad. Then, the paper summarizes the three stages of machine translation and its research status. In history, the progress curve of natural language processing almost accords with that of machine translation, and the two complement each other. Based on this, the paper analyzes the applications of natural language processing in machine translation, and points out the challenges and trends in the field of natural language processing. Finally, the author discusses the relationship between machine translation and human translation in the age of artificial intelligence, and visualizes the future prospect of machine translation.