Abstract

Over the last quarter century, there has been tremendous progress in natural language processing tasks such as machine translation, moving from “eMpTy promises” to an everyday tool. This talk reflects on key drivers for that progress and presents a number of current challenges at the research frontier: (1) extending machine translation from the text to expressive, prosodically rich speech, (2) enabling interaction with large language models across all languages equally, and (3) combining neural and symbolic processes for complex reasoning tasks.

Bio

Philipp Koehn is a leading researcher in the field of machine translation. He published two textbooks in the field; led the development of various toolkits such as Moses and data resources such as Europarl and Paracrawl; published over 200 research papers; received the Award of Honor from the International Association for Machine Translation; was named Fellow of the Association of Computational Linguistics; and currently holds the position of full professor at The Johns Hopkins University (Computer Science), after previously being a full professor at the University of Edinburgh (Chair of Machine Translation in the School of Informatics).

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