Neural Machine Translation: Mainstream and Extremely Fast-Moving Slator

Neural machine translation (NMT) is now mainstream. This was New York University Assistant Professor Kyunghyun Cho's first message during his presentation on NMT at the recent SlatorCon New York on October 12, 2017. When Cho's team started looking into NMT in 2013 and 2014, he said previous MT researchers and industry insiders were convinced it would not work. Efforts in the 1980s and mid-1990s failed, after all. Fast forward to 2017, Cho pointed out that big names like Google, Microsoft, and Facebook use NMT, and sites like Booking.com and even the European Patent Office have all caught the NMT bug.