This presentation will give an overview of what Yandex's technology is and how it has evolved during 3 years of its existence. Farkhat will talk about learnings and success stories, as well as some prospects and plans for the future. They will also share the localization case as a best practice of MT technology implementation.

1. TAUS ROUNDTABLE 2014
22 May/ Moscow (Russia)

2. THURSDAY, 22 May /12:10 – 12:40
MT at Yandex: Overview and Ways We Use It in
Localization
Farkhat Aminov, Yandex
TAUS ROUNDTABLE 2014
22 May/ Moscow (Russia)

3. MT at Yandex
Overview and Ways We Use It in
Localization

4. What is Yandex.Translate
Phrase-based SMT for 42 languages
Online translation service (24/7, 100Gb daily)
Translation application for mobile platforms
Full-functional API
Besides that a team of researchers, developers, linguists,
engineers, designers and managers 

5. Milestones
2009
The beginning of experiments with SMT
2010
Alpha-version of own SMT system for English-Russian pair
2011
Beta-version of the system on translate.yandex.ru
2012
API, machine dictionaries, synonyms, mobile applications
2013
Support for all European languages
Today
Asian languages

6. Languages
Mar
2011
Sep
2011
Aug
2012
Mar
2013
May
2013
Jun
2013
Sep
2013
Dec
2013
Apr
2014
+Russian
+English
+Ukrainian
+Polish
+Turkish
+German
+Spanish
+Italian
+French
+Bulgarian
+Romanian
+Serbian
+Czech
+Belorussian
+Dutch
+Danish
+Swedish
+Portuguese
+Croatian
+Estonian
+Latvian
+Lithuanian
+Armenian
+Azerbaijani
+Greek
+Slovak
+Slovenian
+Albanian
+Catalan
+Macedonian
+Finnish
+Hungarian
+Norwegian
+Arabic
+Hebrew
+Georgian
+Vietnamese
+Indonesian
+Malay
+Maltese
+Bosnian
+Icelandic
3 5
9
13
17
19
33
36
42

7. How we coped

8. Quality
Quality differs
- Similar languages
- Vast linguistic resources
- Complex languages
- Language differences
- Little corpora

9. Quality: Examples
RU: На Петербургский международный экономический форум каждый год собираются
руководители крупнейших российских и иностранных компаний, главы государств и
политические лидеры.
UK: На Петербурзький міжнародний економічний форум щороку збираються керівники
найбільших російських і закордонних компаній, глави держав і політичні лідери.
EN: At the St. Petersburg international economic forum every year gather heads of major
Russian and foreign companies, the heads of state and political leaders.
DE: Auf St. Petersburg International Economic Forum jedes Jahr versammeln sich die Führer
der größten Russischen und ausländischen Unternehmen, die Staats-und die politischen
Führer.
TR: Üzerinde Petersburg uluslararası ekonomik forumu her yıl toplanır yöneticileri, büyük rus ve
yabancı şirketlerin, devlet başkanları ve siyasi liderler.

10. Quality: Evaluation
main metric
BLEU
additional metrics
OOV rate
experiments
METEOR, HMEANT
manual evaluation
Adequacy / Fluency
Test sets (manual or automatic) for
all translation models

11. Quality: Improvement
More data
More experiments
More research

12. Users and Use Cases

13. Yandex.Translate: Web

14. Yandex.Translate: Web
0
1000000
2000000
3000000
4000000
5000000
6000000
7000000
8000000
monthly active users
over 6 000 000
daily translations
3 000 000

15. Yandex.Translate: Mobile Apps
iOS
Windows Phone
Android

16. Yandex.Translate: Mobile Apps
0
100000
200000
300000
400000
500000
600000 Jun-13
Jul-13
Aug-13
Sep-13
Oct-13
Nov-13
Dec-13
Jan-14
Feb-14
Mar-14
Apr-14
monthly active users
500 000
installs
1 300 000

17. Yandex.Translate: Topics
EN-RU DE-RU PL-RU
web pages texts
news
educational texts
correspondence
literature
cooking recipes
documentation
song lyrics / poems
general subjects

18. Yandex.Translate: Languages
80.80%
5.90%
3%
3.40%
1.60%
1.50%
1.50%
0.80%
0.40%
E…
G…
U…
F…
I…
T…
S…
P…
V…

19. Yandex.Search

20. Yandex.Mail

21. Yandex.Browser

22. Yandex.Browser
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
web page translations per day
6 500 000
text fragment translations per
day
1 000 000
Daily traffic (GBs)

23. Internal Services
Interface
Localization
Wiki
translation
Documentatio
n Localization

24. Interface Localization
Machine translated texts approved by human translators
Project 1 Project 2
(short texts) (long texts)
Uk… Uk…En… En…
78,4% 23,2% 46,6% 16,0%

25. Documentation Localization
0%
20%
40%
60%
80%
100%
10-50% 20-60% 25-50%
GOOD
usable segment
EDITABLE
understandable
translation that
needs to be edited
BAD
unusable translation
of segment

26. API

27. API: High Performance

28. API: Clients
Mobile app developers
Language learning services
Text analysis technology
Trading systems & E-commerce
Others

29. API: Free and Paid Service
PAID SERVICE
for business
FREE ACCESS
for small projects

30. 30
Thank you!

31. 31
Farkhat Aminov
aminov@yandex-team.ru
Project Manager,
Yandex.Translate
Yandex.Translate
http://translate.yandex.com
API
http://api.yandex.com/translate
Questions
translate-
business@support.yandex.com