MT Development, Research and Deployment:

Where do we stand in America?

Elliott Macklovitch

Association for Machine Translation

in the Americas (AMTA)

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Caveat emptor

• This is a vast topic!– America is a very big place...– I don't pretend to have all the information

• Globalisation: – increasingly difficult to partition the world into hermetic geographic regions– many of the major players now present and active on all the continents

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Developments in commercial MT

• almost all vendors of general-purpose MT who targeted professional TRs have either gone out of business, or are doing a very different kind of business today

– most significant development in last 10 years!– tells us something very important about classic

model of MT collaboration (= post-editing)

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Where have the MT engines gone?

• Onto the Web, of course!– “free translation” for a surprising range of L's :

http://www.eamt.org/resources/index.html

– or embedded as an add-on to other applications, e.g. IR (AltaVista) or on-line chat (Amikai)

• online MT is rendering a great public service– … but can it turn a profit?

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MT Research

• MT research is definitely on the upswing!– in universities as well as in the private sector,

e.g. Microsoft, AT&T, IBM

• almost all the new projects are (at least partially) in the data-driven paradigm

– SMT: @ ISI, AT&T, UofMaryland, IBM– EBMT: @ Microsoft– the empirical vs. rationalist debate is dead

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MT Research - 2

• Why this renewal of interest & investment in MT research now?

– growing globalisation increases the demand for multilingual documentation

– existing MT technology still not up to the task– the looming crisis in the translation industry

• the rewards for even a partial solution will be substantial

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Computer-assisted Translation

• if preceding analysis is correct, CAT tools should be in strong demand -- and they are!

• but Translation Memory technology seems to have peaked

– cost-effective only for highly repetitive texts– exploits only a small portion of the knowledge

residing in translators’ past production– freelancers resent receiving TM output

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Other types of CAT tools

• in Canada, a number of new bi-textual IR systems on the market:

– TSrali.com: Web-based bilingual concordancer– LogiTerm, MultiTrans: term management plus

bi-textual IR on translation service archives

• novel applications for probabilistic translation models

– TransType: a new take on interactive MT

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Conclusions

• translation industry is booming in America!– MT's market share remains relatively marginal

• MT has migrated to the Web, where it is rendering a great public service (gisting)

– yet few professional TRs use MT day-to-day

• the paradigm shift in NLP: the effects on translation automation are just beginning to be felt