MT Summit XI

The 11th Machine Translation Summit (MT Summit XI) is taking place in Copenhagen, Denmark, and brings together researchers, developers and even some users. Invited speakers have included, for instance, Stephen Richardson from Microsoft Research and Philipp Koehn from the University of Edinburgh.

Microsoft has recently launched their free online machine translation on Translator Live Beta. It is based on Systran and includes some alternative systems from Microsoft for technical domains. Systran is a rule-based system and is the backbone of most machine translation systems provided online, including Google's translator.

Koehn introduced the EuroMatrix project that tries to facilitate resource and tool sharing between researchers, a framework for evaluation of systems for machine translation between all the official languages in the European Union. His talk and the following discussion pointed out the fact that statistical machine translation research is reliving the past of rule-based machine translation research, as there is more and more demand for implementation of syntactic and semantic analysis in the statistical machine translation framework.

Philipp Koehn giving his talk.