On 4/24/13 8:29 AM, Erik Moeller wrote:
Are there open source MT efforts that are close enough to merit
scrutiny? In order to be able to provide high quality result, you
would need not only a motivated, well-intentioned group of people, but
some of the smartest people in the field working on it. I doubt we
could more than kickstart an effort, but perhaps financial backing at
significant scale could at least help a non-profit, open source effort
to develop enough critical mass to go somewhere.
I do think this is strategically relevant to Wikimedia. But there is
already significant financial backing attempting to kickstart
open-source MT, with some results. The goal is strategically relevant to
another, much larger organization: the European Union. From 2006 through
2012 they allocated about $10m to kickstart open-source MT, though
focused primarily on European languages, via the EuroMatrix (2006-09)
and EuroMatrixPlus (2009-12) research projects. One of the concrete
results [1] of those projects was Moses, which I believe is currently
the most actively developed open-source MT system.
http://www.statmt.org/moses/
In light of that, I would suggest trying to see if we can adapt or join
those efforts, rather than starting a new project or organization. One
strategy could be to: 1) fund internal Wikimedia work to see if Moses
can already be used for our purposes; and 2) fund improvements in cases
where it isn't good enough yet (whether this is best done through grants
to academic researchers, payments to contractors, hiring internal staff,
or posting open bounties for implementing features, I haven't thought
much about).
Best,
Mark
[1] They have a nice list of other software and data coming out of the
project as well: http://www.euromatrixplus.net/resources/
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