> 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 
[...]
> 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.  

Unless I've badly misunderstood all the papers I have read, EBMT does not 
build anything by hand. Existing translated texts are used as sources of 
examples which are sought out and reused on the fly. In some reported 
experiments, the examples were handpicked, or pruned to get rid of awkward 
cases, but I don't think this idea is taken seriously as the way to do EBMT.

One recent flavour of EBMT has been to extract similar examples beforehand and 
generalise them, giving translation templates which could be likened to old-
fashioned transfer rules. But again this is done automatically. This seems to 
me to be very close to the latest trend in phrase-based SMT, and if I had been 
someone who had worked on this idea and calling it EBMT I would find it quite 
galling not to be cited, or being asked to compare it with an approach that 
actually postdates what I had done. 

It seems to me EBMT is very misundersttod ... at the other end of the scale 
are writers who don't distinguish EBMT and translation memory, but that's 
another hobby horse.

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