May I humbly suggest that we do some market research and see how many institutions/organisations out there dream about an MT system that out of the box performs at 37 BLEU points less that merely substituting each phrase for its most likely translation? I dare say that most users would expect a system to perform *better* than such a blatantly obvious baseline out of the box.
So, please, can we stop trying to play the academic high ground here and just accept that the default behaviour of Moses is much less than desirable? James ________________________________ From: Lane Schwartz <dowob...@gmail.com> Sent: Wednesday, June 24, 2015 5:56 PM To: Read, James C Cc: Rico Sennrich; moses-support@mit.edu Subject: Re: [Moses-support] Major bug found in Moses On Wed, Jun 24, 2015 at 9:05 AM, Read, James C <jcr...@essex.ac.uk<mailto:jcr...@essex.ac.uk>> wrote: As the title of this thread makes clear the purpose of reporting the bug was not to invite a discussion about conclusions made in my draft paper. Clearly a community that builds its career around research in SMT is unlikely to agree with those kinds of conclusions. The purpose was to report the flaw in the default behaviour of Moses in the hope that we could all agree that something ought to be done about it. So far you seem to be the only one who has come even close to acknowledging that there is a problem with Moses default behaviour. James, I wasn't talking about the conclusion in your paper. I was talking about the conclusion in your email: If the default behaviour produces BLEU scores considerably lower than merely selecting the most likely translation of each phrase then evidently there is something very wrong with the default behaviour. Your conclusion, quoted above, is seriously flawed. There is not "something very wrong with the default behavior" of Moses. You have not exposed a bug in Moses. What you have exposed is your own lack of understanding of modern statistical machine translation, and your unwillingness to listen when others take the time to explain how and why you are mistaken. I am happy to help explain things to people who are willing to listen. However, you have shown yourself to be not only rude but obstinate and willfully ignorant. I hope that others who find this thread may find it informative. You appear to have learned nothing from it. Until you become willing to listen to others, and until you take a statistical machine translation class and are willing to pay attention to what you learn there, I don't see any point in taking the time to explain things further. As far as I am concerned, this discussion is over. Sincerely, Lane Schwartz
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