Today Yandex.Translate launched a hybrid machine translation system that combines neural and statistical approaches to machine translation to deliver our users an even higher quality translation that utilizes the complementary strengths of both translation models. The new system first translates users’ queries using both a statistical and a neural machine translation model.  Next, CatBoost, our gradient boosting library ranks the outputs of each model, ultimately selecting the highest quality translation. 

On September 23rd, Yandex celebrated 20 years building innovative products and services. In this blog post, we want to share some of our favorite memories from the past 20 years.