Moses (machine translation) explained

Moses is a statistical machine translation engine that can be used to train statistical models of text translation from a source language to a target language, developed by the University of Edinburgh.^[2] Moses then allows new source-language text to be decoded using these models to produce automatic translations in the target language. Training requires a parallel corpus of passages in the two languages, typically manually translated sentence pairs. Moses is free and open-source software, released under the GNU Library Public License (LGPL), and available as source code and binary files for Windows^[3] and Linux. Its development is supported mainly by the EuroMatrix project, with funding by the European Commission.

Among its features are:

A beam search algorithm that quickly finds the highest probability translation within a set of choices
Phrase-based translation of short text chunks
Handles words with multiple factored representations to enable integrating linguistic and other information (e.g., surface form, lemma and morphology, part-of-speech, word class)
Decodes ambiguous forms of a source sentence, represented as a confusion network, to support integrating with upstream tools such as speech recognizers
Support for large language models (LMs) such as IRSTLM (an exact LM using memory-mapping) and RandLM (an inexact LM based on Bloom filters)

Notes and References