The Emerging World of Neural Net Driven MT

Originally posted here, where you can see all the graphics. There has been much in the news lately about the next wave of MT technology driven by a technology called deep learning and neural nets (DNN). I will attempt to provide a brief layman's overview about what this is, even though I am barely qualified to do this (but if Trump can run for POTUS then surely my trying to do this is less of a stretch). Please feel free to correct me if I have inadvertently made errors here. Traditional AI methods of language understanding depended on embedding rules of language into a system, but in the Google SmartReply project, as with all modern machine learning, the system was fed enough data to learn on its own, just as a child would.