Machine Translation From Real Users To Research

Machine Translation: From Real Users to Research

The previous conference in this series (AMTA 2002) took up the theme “From Research to Real Users”, and sought to explore why recent research on data-driven machine translation didn’t seem to be moving to the marketplace. As it turned out, the ?rst commercial products of the data-driven research movement were just over the horizon, andintheinterveningtwoyearstheyhavebeguntoappearinthemarketplace. Atthesame time,rule-basedmachinetranslationsystemsareintroducingdata-driventechniquesinto the mix in their products. Machine translation as a software application has a 50-year history. There are an increasing number of exciting deployments of MT, many of which will be exhibited and discussed at the conference. But the scale of commercial use has never approached the estimates of the latent demand. In light of this, we reversed the question from AMTA 2002, to look at the next step in the path to commercial success for MT. We took user needs as our theme, and explored how or whether market requirements are feeding into research programs. The transition of research discoveries to practical use involves te- nicalquestionsthatarenotassexyasthosethathavedriventheresearchcommunityand research funding. Important product issues such as system customizability, computing resource requirements, and usability and ?tness for particular tasks need to engage the creativeenergiesofallpartsofourcommunity,especiallyresearch,aswemovemachine translation from a niche application to a more pervasive language conversion process. Thesetopicswereaddressedattheconferencethroughthepaperscontainedinthesep- ceedings, and even more speci?cally through several invited presentations and panels.

Machine Translation: From Research to Real Users

AMTA 2002: From Research to Real Users Ever since the showdown between Empiricists and Rationalists a decade ago at TMI 92, MT researchers have hotly pursued promising paradigms for MT, including da- driven approaches (e.g., statistical, example-based) and hybrids that integrate these with more traditional rule-based components. During the same period, commercial MT systems with standard transfer archit- tures have evolved along a parallel and almost unrelated track, increasing their cov- age (primarily through manual update of their lexicons, we assume) and achieving much broader acceptance and usage, principally through the medium of the Internet. Webpage translators have become commonplace; a number of online translation s- vices have appeared, including in their offerings both raw and postedited MT; and large corporations have been turning increasingly to MT to address the exigencies of global communication. Still, the output of the transfer-based systems employed in this expansion represents but a small drop in the ever-growing translation marketplace bucket.

Machine Translation