> On 24/04/13 08:29, Erik Moeller wrote: >> Could open source MT be such a strategic investment? I don't know, but >> I'd like to at least raise the question. I think the alternative will >> be, for the foreseeable future, to accept that this piece of >> technology will be proprietary, and to rely on goodwill for any >> integration that concerns Wikimedia. Not the worst outcome, but also >> not the best one. >> >> 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. > > A huge and worthwile effort on its own, and anyway a necessary step for > creating free MT software, would be to build a free (as in freedom) > parallel translation corpus. This corpus could then be used as the > starting point by people and groups who are producing free MT software, > either under WMF or on their own. > > This could be done by creating a new project where volunteers could > compare Wikipedia articles and other free translated texts and mark > sentences that are translations of other sentences. By the way, I > believe Google Translate's corpus was created in this way. > > Perhaps this could be best achieved by teaming with www.zooniverse.org > or www.pgdp.net who have experience in this kind of projects. This would > require specialized non-wiki software, and I don't think that the > Foundation has enough experience in developing it. > > (By the way, similar things that could be similarly useful include free > OCR training data or free fully annotated text.)
The Bible is quite good for this. Fred _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
