Parallel machine translation: principles and practice

Parallel machine translation (PMT) is a new machine translation paradigm that takes advantage of high-speed and large-memory computers and existing machine translation systems with different characteristics to solve the difficult machine translation problem. PMT is based on technologies of parallel computing, machine translation, and artificial intelligence. A PMT system consists of many machine translation procedures running in parallel, coordinated by a controller to dissolve various ambiguities in machine translation. We have designed and implemented a PMT system based on the above approach at a coarse parallel level. The system consists of four independent machine translation subsystems. Each subsystem is implemented using an existing machine translation technique and has its own characteristics. We present the principles and practice of PMT. We also present some results of experiments with our experimental PMT system and point out some future research on PMT.