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<Paper uid="W01-1405">
  <Title>Stochastic Modelling: From Pattern Classification to Language Translation</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> The use of statistics in computational linguistics has been extremely controversial for more than three decades. The controversy is very well summarized by the statement of Chomsky in 1969 (Chomsky 1969): &amp;quot;It must be recognized that the notion of a 'probability of a sentence' is an entirely useless one, under any interpretation of this term&amp;quot;.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> This statement was considered to be correct by the majority of experts from artificial intelligence and computational linguistics, and the concept of statistics was banned from computational linguistics for many years.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> What is overlooked in this statement is the fact that, in an automatic system for speech recognition or language translation, we are faced with the problem of taking decisions. It is exactly here where statistical decision theory comes in. In automatic speech recognition (ASR), the success of the statistical approach is based on the equation:</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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