Shift to Neural Machine Translation (NMT) in Research

Around 2014-2016, the AI research community, including those at Amazon, rapidly shifted from statistical machine translation (SMT) to neural machine translation (NMT) models, which showed vastly superior performance.

Significance

This fundamental shift in machine learning paradigms provided the technological bedrock that Amazon Translate, and other modern MT services, would be built upon, enabling far higher quality translations.