Reaction to Somers: Current research in Machine Translation

Abstract

To begin with, I would like to welcome the idea of having 'forum' style peer group commentary of papers in MT: one of the less appealing features of the field is the general lack of communication between people who work on different projects, or with different assumptions. Apart from being unappealing, it also damaging to the field, since one effect is that people rarely learn about, and so cannot learn from, each other's mistakes (or successes). It may be that this forum will go some way to change things by encouraging debate. In this context, of course, Harry Somers' (HLS) stimulating paper is a good starting point, because, despite having concentrated mainly on work in some way connected with his own institution in the fourth section ('Some Alternative Avenues of Research), he has given, in the earlier sections, what seems to me a very reasonable summary of what is, and has been, going on. However, I have some fundamental disagreements with the paper. The first is with the perspective that HLS takes in his critique of the 'second generation' . I think HLS assumes that MT is about the construction of working, commercial translation systems. It is with respect to this aim that he finds the second generation a failure. Now, while this is an important aim of MT research, it not the only aim. More generally, the main aim of MT research should be to enhance understanding about what is involved in automating the translation process. This involves (i) addressing issues, and (ii) developing techniques. (It is because of a failure to see this that so many conference papers on MT consist of pictures of outline boxes with arrows going between them, and unrevealing captions). I also think MT research may eventually have something to say about the nature of translation. This is an important goal that goes well beyond, and may be in tension with the practical goal of building MT systems. In a sense this perspective is a puzzling one for HLS to take (e.g. he does not continue with it when he talks in section 4 about avenues of research this is all about techniques), but for whatever reason, I think it leads him wrong in his evaluation of a number of things. One example: