{"slug": "mimicking-neural-machine-translation-history-for-pedagogic-reasons", "title": "Mimicking Neural Machine Translation History for Pedagogic Reasons", "summary": "Vincent Vandeghinste presented a paper at the 1st International Workshop on Teaching AI-Based Translation and Technologies (TAITT 2026) describing a teaching method that replicates the historical development of neural machine translation (NMT) systems on a single small dataset so students can observe each step's effect on metrics such as BLEU and on qualitative examples generated after every epoch. The paper covers NMT training from scratch, finetuning pretrained encoder-decoder models, and prompt engineering for decoder-only models, with all models run in Kaggle sessions and all Python scripts and Jupyter notebooks released to the MT teaching community via GitHub and public Kaggle sessions. The paper appears in the TAITT 2026 proceedings, pages 19–27, published by the European Association for Machine Translation in Tilburg, the Netherlands, in June 2026.", "body_md": "##### Abstract\n\nIn this paper we describe how we mimick the different steps in the historical development of NMT systems, all trained and evaluated on the same small data set. We do this for pedagogic reasons so students can see the effect of each of the steps on metrics like BLEU but also on qualitative examples, which the training scripts generate after each epoch. As MT paradigms, we discuss NMT training from scratch, finetuning pretrained encoder-decoder models, and finally prompt engineering for decoder only models. All models run in Kaggle sessions and all Python scripts and JuPyter notebooks are made available to the MT teaching community through Github and public Kaggle sessions.\n- Anthology ID:\n- 2026.taitt-1.3\n- Volume:\n- [Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Teaching AI-Based Translation and Technologies (TAITT 2026)](https://aclanthology.org/volumes/2026.taitt-1/)\n- Month:\n- June\n- Year:\n- 2026\n- Address:\n- Tilburg, the Netherlands\n- Editors:\n- [Ralph Krüger](https://aclanthology.org/people/ralph-kruger/unverified/) ,[Dorothy Kenny](https://aclanthology.org/people/dorothy-kenny/unverified/) ,[Sheila Castilho](https://aclanthology.org/people/sheila-castilho/unverified/) ,[Sergi Álvarez-Vidal](https://aclanthology.org/people/sergi-alvarez-vidal/) ,[Nora Aranberri](https://aclanthology.org/people/nora-aranberri/unverified/) ,[María Isabel Rivas Ginel](https://aclanthology.org/people/maria-isabel-rivas-ginel/unverified/) ,[Janiça Hackenbuchner](https://aclanthology.org/people/janica-hackenbuchner/)\n- Venues:\n- [TAITT](https://aclanthology.org/venues/taitt/) |[WS](https://aclanthology.org/venues/ws/)\n- SIG:\n- Publisher:\n- European Association for Machine Translation\n- Note:\n- Pages:\n- 19–27\n- Language:\n- URL:\n- [https://aclanthology.org/2026.taitt-1.3/](https://aclanthology.org/2026.taitt-1.3/)\n- DOI:\n- Cite (ACL):\n- Vincent Vandeghinste. 2026. [Mimicking Neural Machine Translation History for Pedagogic Reasons](https://aclanthology.org/2026.taitt-1.3/) . In*Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Teaching AI-Based Translation and Technologies (TAITT 2026)* , pages 19–27, Tilburg, the Netherlands. European Association for Machine Translation.\n- Cite (Informal):\n- [Mimicking Neural Machine Translation History for Pedagogic Reasons](https://aclanthology.org/2026.taitt-1.3/) (Vandeghinste, TAITT 2026)\n- PDF:\n- [https://aclanthology.org/2026.taitt-1.3.pdf](https://aclanthology.org/2026.taitt-1.3.pdf)", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/mimicking-neural-machine-translation-history-for-pedagogic-reasons", "canonical_source": "https://aclanthology.org/2026.taitt-1.3/", "published_at": "2026-09-17 00:00:00+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-09-22 19:24:04.792149+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["machine-learning", "natural-language-processing", "large-language-models", "ai-research"], "entities": ["Vincent Vandeghinste", "TAITT 2026", "European Association for Machine Translation", "Kaggle", "GitHub", "Jupyter"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/mimicking-neural-machine-translation-history-for-pedagogic-reasons", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/mimicking-neural-machine-translation-history-for-pedagogic-reasons.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/mimicking-neural-machine-translation-history-for-pedagogic-reasons.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/mimicking-neural-machine-translation-history-for-pedagogic-reasons.jsonld"}}