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

Denny Vrandečić denny.vrandecic at wikimedia.de
Thu Apr 25 15:26:07 UTC 2013


2013/4/25 Brion Vibber <bvibber at wikimedia.org>

> You are blowing my mind, dude. :)
>

Glad to do hear :)


I suspect this approach won't serve for everything, but it sounds
> *awesome*. If we can tie natural-language statements directly to data nodes
> (rather than merely annotating vague references like we do today), then
> we'd be much better able to keep language versions in sync. How to make
> them sane to edit... sounds harder. :)
>

Absolutely correct, it would not serve for everything. And it doesn't have
to. For an encyclopedia we should be able to get a useful amount of
"frames" in a decent timeframe. For song lyrics, it might take a bit longer.

It would and should start with a restricted set of possible frames, but the
trick would be to make the user extensible. Because that is where we are
good at -- users who fill and extend the frameworks we provide. I don't
know of much work where the frames and rules themselves are user editable
and extensible, but heck, they people said we are crazy when we made the
properties user editable and extensible in Semantic MediaWiki and later
Wikidata, and it seems to be working out.

A sane editing interface - both for the rules and the content, and their
interaction - would be something that would need to be explored first, just
to check whether this is indeed possible or just wishful thinking. Starting
without this kind of exploration beforehand would be a bit adventurous, or
optimistic.

Cheers,
Denny


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