The neural MT blog focuses on advances and challenges in the field of machine translation.

Today, Iconic Translation, a recent RWS Holdings acquisition that specializes in machine translation (MT), published its 100th issue in its ongoing series “The Neural MT Weekly.” The series began in July 2018, when the Neural MT Weekly team intended to create an eight-part series. Since then, the weekly series has taken off. “The series has exceeded all expectations. What’s started as a by-product of internal reading group and wiki, has grown into something that’s read by thousands of people each week. Our team can be very proud of that,” said John Tinsley, managing director of Iconic.

The blog focuses on neural machine translation (NMT), with topics selected by members of the Iconic team as well as by guest authors. Throughout the first 100 issues, the series has featured 13 different authors, both guest writers and writers from  Iconic. With hundreds of thousands of unique views and social media engagement, the series has even kickstarted a webinar series.

“We’ve been delighted to hear that many researchers in the field have the series bookmarked for reference, that the blogs are used as teaching aides in university courses on Natural Language Processing, and, awesomely, some of our blogs will soon be translated into Chinese for our growing audience,” said Tinsley.

Among the many NMT topics covered, model improvement has made up a significant portion of the blog, especially in the past six months. The blog has also included major topics in terminology and vocabulary coverage, multilingual MT, data creation and low resourced languages, evaluation, domain adaptation, as well as issues around language modeling, robustness, and speed and scaling.

Considering the ongoing relevance of these issues, Iconic expects the blog to continue covering them, especially in relation to questions around advances and challenges in the field of NMT.