Hi Tomasso, and others *1. I support the addition of neural MT decoder. * The world has moved on, and NMT is clearly the way to go forward. If you dont believe my words, read what Matt Post himself said [1] three years ago!
I have spent the past three years focusing on NMT as part of my job and Ph.D -- I'd be glad to contribute in that direction. There are many NMT toolkits out there today. (Fairseq, sockeye, tensor2tensor, ....) The right thing to do, IMHO, is simply merge one of the NMT toolkits with Joshua project. We can do that as long as it's Apache License right? We will now have to move towards python land as most toolkits are in python. On the positive side, we will be losing the ancient perl scripts that many are not fan of. I have been working on my own NMT toolkit for my work and research -- RTG https://isi-nlp.github.io/rtg/#conf I had worked on Joshua in the past, mainly, I improved the code quality [2]. So you can tell my new code'd be upto Apache's standards ;) *2. Pretrained MT models for lots of languages* I have been working on a lib to retrieve parallel data from many sources -- MTData [3] There is so much parallel data out their for hundreds of languages. My recent estimate is over a billion lines of parallel sentences for over 500 languages is freely and publicly available for download using MTData tool. If we find some sponsors to lend us some resources, we could train better MT models and update the Language Packs section [4]. Perhaps, one massively multilingual NMT model that supports many translation directions (I know its possible with NMT; I tested it recently with RTG) I am interested in hearing what others are thinking. [1] https://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/joshua-dev/201709.mbox/%3CA481E867-A845-4BC0-B5AF-5CEAAB3D0B7D%40cs.jhu.edu%3E [2] - https://github.com/apache/joshua/pulls?q=author%3Athammegowda+ [3] - https://github.com/thammegowda/mtdata [4] - https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/JOSHUA/Language+Packs Cheers, TG -- *Thamme Gowda * @thammegowda <https://twitter.com/thammegowda> | https://isi.edu/~tg ~Sent via somebody's Webmail server ಸೋಮ, ಅಕ್ಟೋ 5, 2020 ರಂದು 12:16 ಪೂರ್ವಾಹ್ನ ಸಮಯಕ್ಕೆ ರಂದು Tommaso Teofili < tommaso.teof...@gmail.com> ಅವರು ಬರೆದಿದ್ದಾರೆ: > Hi all, > > This is a roll call for people interested in contributing to Apache Joshua > going forward. > Contributing could be not just code, but anything that may help the project > or serve the community. > > In case you're interested in helping out please speak up :-) > > Code-wise Joshua has not evolved much in the latest months, there's room > for both improvements to the current code (make a new minor release) and > new ideas / code branches (e.g. neural MT based Joshua Decoder). > > Regards, > Tommaso >
