Artificial intelligence · 1990

Statistical machine translation

IBM learns translation from millions of parallel Canadian parliament sentences.

Peter Brown and colleagues at IBM trained word alignment models on the English-French Hansard, replacing grammar rules with probabilities. The approach powered Google Translate from 2006 until 2016 and established data over rules as the winning strategy in language.

See it in the living tree Wikipedia

Arcs above join it to what it stood on, arcs below to what it led to. The bar places this stretch on the tree's whole timeline.

What it built on 2

Statistical speech recognition 1975
Georgetown-IBM translation 1954

What it led to 2

Neural language model 2003
Watson wins Jeopardy! 2011

Related measurements

The dashed line marks when it first worked.

Training compute of notable AI models Source: Epoch AI, Notable AI Models (CC BY 4.0)

Computation per constant dollar, 1850-2006 Latest: 7.3B million units of computer power per 2006 $ (2003) Source: Nordhaus 2007, Two Centuries of Productivity Growth in Computing, J. Econ. Hist. 67(1), Table 6