> The ISLE framework is interesting, but what I need/want is not just a
> list of criteria and considerations, but the facts as they pertain to
> the different vendors' products. I think -that- information is a long
> way from being made readily available.
This is an interesting point. I have run into this problem in trying
to teach our graduate MT course's lecture on "Commercial MT systems".
It's very difficult to get concrete, useful information from MT
vendors (other than that "ours is the best, you should buy it").
Since (it seems to me) any such information will necessarily be all
wrapped up in marketting issues, I wonder how it would be possible to
get straight, reliable information on a range of companies. (That is,
every company clearly wants to look like they are the best.) I know
there has been some discussion of some kind of Consumer Reports for
MT, but this is bound to be expensive to do (independently) in a
serious way.
I find myself wondering whether anything like this exists for other
commercial software fields. I suspect not, actually. After all, any
serious quality comparison would be damaging to Microsoft. :-)
So, is there any reliable, independent assessment of commercial
software in other fields? If so, how do they manage to do it? (Or is
it perhaps easier to evaluate other software copared to MT systems?)
Bob
--
Robert E. Frederking Senior Systems Scientist
Language Technologies Institute/Center for Machine Translation
Carnegie Mellon University
5000 Forbes Avenue Telephone: +1-412-268-6656
Pittsburgh, PA 15213 USA FAX: +1-412-268-6298
Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] WWW: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~ref/
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