Eduard Hovy wrote:
It seems to me the method of construction is less important than the method of operation, so I'd vote for calling them similar.
This reminds me of Harry Somer's review article on EBMT, where he suggests that EBMT systems typically exhibit the two following distinguishing characteristics:
1. Linguistic knowledge is mostly contained in an "example-base", i.e. a collection of previously translated text, possibly preprocessed to various degrees;
2. the translation process per se normally proceeds in three distinct phases, which he refers to as "matching", "alignment/adaptation", and "recombination".
However, in a follow-up to this article, Davide Turcato and Fred Popowich argue that by putting too much emphasis on processing issues, we are missing the point, and we end up with banalities about MT in general: in the end, "matching" is just another word for "analysis", "alignment/adaptation" essentially boils down to "transfer", and "recombination" is mostly a synonym for "generation". (In fact, Somers himself makes these equivalences explicit, by pasting the EBMT buzzwords unto the "Vauquois pyramid".) To some extent, *any* MT system can be claimed to perform all of the above steps. Furthermore, and by Somers's own account, to carry out each of these tasks, EBMT systems basically rely on the same plethora of mechanisms as other systems (taggers, chunkers, parsers, etc.). So basing a definition on this division of the translation task turns out to be a bit sterile.
Which leaves us, at least in my reading, with only one distinguishing feature: What truly distinguishes EBMT from other paradigms is its reliance on examples as a means of capturing and storing knowledge about language and translation.
Interestingly, by this criterion, word-based SMT (a la IBM) is not EBMT. But phrase-based SMT is.
Michel
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