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

[George Herbert]

This subthread seems headed out into practical / applied epistemology, if
there is such a thing.

I am not sure if we can get from here to there; that said, a new structure
with language independent facts / information points that then got
machine-explained or described in a local language would be an interesting
structure to build an encyclopedia around.  Wikidata is a good idea but not
enough here.  I'm not sure the state of knowledge theory and practice is
good enough to do this, but I am suddenly more interested in IBM's Watson
project and some related knowledge / natural language interaction AI work...

This is very interesting, but probably less midterm-practical than machine
translation and the existing WP / other project data.


On Thu, Apr 25, 2013 at 8:46 AM, Denny Vrandečić <
denny.vrandecic at wikimedia.de> wrote:

> 2013/4/25 Mathieu Stumpf <psychoslave at culture-libre.org>
>
> > What would be the limits you would expect from your solution, because you
> > can't expect to just "translate" everything. Form may be a part of the
> > meaning. It's clear that you can't translate a poem for example. Sur
> > wikipedia is not primary concerned about poetry, but it does treat the
> > subject.
> >
> >
> I don't know where the limits would be. Probably further then we think
> right now, but yes, they still would be there and severe. The nice thing is
> that we would be collecting data about the limits constantly, and could
> thus "feed" the system to further improve and grow. Not automatically (I
> guess, but bots would obviously also be allowed to work on the rules as
> well), but through human intelligence, analyzing the input and trying to
> refine and extend the rules.
>
> But, considering the already existing bot created articles, which number in
> the hundred thousands in languages like Swedish, Dutch, or Polish, there
> seems to be some consensus that this can be considered as a useful starting
> block. It's just that with the current system, even with Wikidata, we
> cannot really grow into this direction further.
>
> Cheers,
> Denny
>
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-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com