As many of you know, I submit to and review for many NLP and (especially) MT conferences. In my experience (and I trust this is relatively uncontroversial), the vast majority of MT papers that one sees nowadays are corpus-based. Now, even though I work mostly in the area of EBMT, I think it is again uncontroversial to state that most of the corpus-based MT papers one sees are not EBMT, but rather SMT. Herein
lies the point I would like to make.
We submitted a paper recently to a conference (I won't say which, but it wasn't an MT conference per se) which was turned down. The paper received 3 reviews. One comment received was:
"the paper ... completely ignores the current mainstream empirical
approach to machine translation: phrase-based or template-based
statistical machine translation".This was true - it did. One useful comment was for us to compare our approach with an SMT approach - we're trying this out as we speak, but I wonder whether any SMT paper would be asked to compare its findings with those of an EBMT approach? Is it the case nowadays that a paper on (the admittedly considerably less mainstream) EBMT cannot stand on its own merit?
Nevertheless, EBMT has been chunking sentences into phrases from the word go. SMT has recently caught on to this idea, and results have improved quite dramatically. Despite this, one other comment was:
"there is no discussion to how [our approach] would compare
with more established techniques such as word-alignment using
statistical models. Showing that [our approach] is comparable
(or better) than the traditional way of acquiring
phrase-alignment [SMT, references excluded here] would make
this paper just great".I think this is my main concern: SMT is very well (and deservedly so) established nowadays as the main way to do MT. Unless you're an MT person, you'd think that it was the _only_ way to do MT, as here.
We've all received rejections before, and dodgy reviews too. I too reject papers, and I'm sure I've given the odd dodgy review too! I hope
I'm making it clear that's not my main concern here. Rather, I have
these questions:
1. Can papers on EBMT succeed in getting published (especially in
non-expert, i.e. MT-specific, conferences) without making direct
comparisons to SMT? 2. Can anyone envisage a situation where an SMT paper was asked to
compare its results against an MT model? 3. Has EBMT as a paradigm been 'muscled out' by the more dominant
SMT approach? 4. Instead of signalling the 'bright new dawn' for EBMT, will the
volume of [Carl & Way, 2003] instead come to be seen as the
epitaph for this approach?OK, maybe I'm being a bit OTT here, but you get the point. Anyone care to indulge me here?
Cheers, Andy.
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