Classification of sequences, such as the translation of natural language sentences, is carried out using an independence assumption. The independence assumption is an assumption that the probability of a correct translation of a source sentence word into a particular target sentence word is independent of the translation of other words in the sentence. Although this assumption is not a correct one, a high level of word translation accuracy is nonetheless achieved. In particular, discriminative training is used to develop models for each target vocabulary word based on a set of features of the corresponding source word in training sentences, with at least one of those features relating to the context of the source word. Each model comprises a weight vector for the corresponding target vocabulary word. The weights comprising the vectors are associated with respective ones of the features; each weight is a measure of the extent to which the presence of that feature for the source word makes it more probable that the target word in question is the correct one.
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