Synchronous grammars and transducers
Stuart M. Shieber · 2007
Much of the activity in linguistics, especially computational linguistics, can be thought of as characterizing not languages simpliciter but relations among languages. Formal systems for characterizing language relations have a long history with two primary branches, based respectively on tree transducers and synchronous grammars. Both have seen increasing use in recent work, especially in machine translation. Indeed, evidence from millennia of experience with bilingual dictionaries argues for synchronous grammars as an appropriate substrate for statistical machine translation systems.