[Corpora-List] Google's translations

Angus Grieve-Smith grvsmth at panix.com
Sun Mar 14 23:50:39 CET 2010


On 3/11/2010 10:10 AM, chris brew wrote:
>
>
> On Thu, Mar 11, 2010 at 8:18 AM, Peter Kolb <pekoli at gmail.com
> <mailto:pekoli at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
> I have three comments:
>
> 1. The text by Kant contains a lot of anaphoric pronouns. From
> Google's translation it is obvious that their system does not
> perform any pronoun resolution (or at least none that works better
> than a random baseline). However, there exist German to English
> translation engines on the market that incorporate such components.
>
>
> I would moderate that conclusion. If, as I suspect, the Google engine
> for German to English is a statistical
> one, it will be choosing a translation by optimizing a complex
> internal criterion that involves tradeoffs between multiple criteria.
> Because SMT systems are not conventionally modular, it is hard to
> say what components they have or do not have.

Which is why it would be a huge boon to the science of language if more of the statistical machine translation systems produced some kind of human-readable report of what they "learn" from their "training" data.

--

-Angus B. Grieve-Smith

grvsmth at panix.com

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