Next steps

While we have shown our sequence-to-sequence model to be effective at performing language translation, the model we trained from scratch is not a perfect translator by any means. This is, in part, due to the relatively small size of our training data. We trained our model on a set of 30,000 English/German sentences. While this might seem very large, in order to train a perfect model, we would require a training set that's several orders of magnitude larger.

In theory, we would require several examples of each word in the entire English and German languages for our model to truly understand its context and meaning. For context, the 30,000 English sentences in our training set consisted of just 6,000 unique words. The average vocabulary of an English speaker is said to be between 20,000 and 30,000 words, which gives us an idea of just how many examples sentences we would need to train a model that performs perfectly. This is probably why the most accurate translation...