Hello Andy,
Date: Thu, 08 Jul 2004 14:28:12 +0100 From: Andy Way <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
2. Can anyone envisage a situation where an SMT paper was asked to compare its results against an MT model?
More than most other approaches, SMT people tend to ignore previous work in the mistaken belief that it is not relevant, because SMT is such a new paradigm. That is simply wrong, of course, as people have argued (even in this mailing list). SMT is re-treading the path of older approaches, but now doing things automatically that used to be done by hand:
- the initial IBM work recreated word-replacement MT, but learned the
replacement rules automatically
- Och's and other current SMT is redoing EBMT, but learning the phrases
(i.e., examples) automatically
- Yamada and Knight, Wu, and Melamed each are working on versions of
transfer, with the rules, again, being learned
1. Can papers on EBMT succeed in getting published (especially in
non-expert, i.e. MT-specific, conferences) without making direct
comparisons to SMT?
Given the above trend, I think an effective response is to explicitly say in an EBMT paper "yes I am doing EBMT but creating the example phrases and their translation by hand; some SMT is creating the phrases by machine; for me an open question is not only how to create lots of patterns automatically but how good the actual patterns are", which simultaneously shows familiarity with the relevant SMT work, brings it into the picture in the right way, and addresses a point on which SMT-style EBMT is vulnerable.
the bigger point, though, is: why should one not make comparisons to SMT-style EBMT? A serious weakness of EBMT has always been the bottleneck of building the example patterns and their translations manually. SMT-style EBMT claims to overcome this bottleneck. Good science demands that old-style EBMT work address this. You can still then redirect the issue to the particular other, non-building, point you are investigating.
3. Has EBMT as a paradigm been 'muscled out' by the more dominant
SMT approach?
I don't think so, because SMT is no longer a single unitary approach, and will continue to split into flavors, just as MT has done. And these flavors will increasingly correspond to the old approaches of the Vauquois pyramid. SMT just does much of the tedious work automatically, and in some cases much better, than humans can. EBMT should not try to compete with SMT on its strength (brute force learning of large sets of example patterns), but should co-opt SMT as a technique to do its gruntwork.
The open questions of MT are still open: no-one can properly handle interpersonal/stylistic/pragmatic effects of communication. If one could use EBMT methods to capture style, for example, you'd be doing something that syntax-based transfer approaches would find very hard to do, and SMT approaches would struggle with given their need for large corpora of unitary style.
E
-- Eduard Hovy email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] USC Information Sciences Institute tel: 310-448-8731 4676 Admiralty Way fax: 310-823-6714 Marina del Rey, CA 90292-6695 http://www.isi.edu/natural-language/nlp-at-isi.html
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