[Wikimedia-l] The case for supporting open source machine translation

[sankarshan]

On Wed, Apr 24, 2013 at 11:59 AM, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> 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.

There is a compelling need to assess availability of training corpus
of significant breadth and depth for the languages. Most open-source
implementations of MT end up hitting this hurdle because content of
scale is not easily available. It would be appropriate to decide
whether WMF/Wikipedia is well placed to turn on a firehose like API
that would enable MT implementations to use statistical and other
methods on the existing content itself.


--
sankarshan mukhopadhyay
<https://twitter.com/#!/sankarshan>