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

[rupert THURNER]

On Wed, Apr 24, 2013 at 10:49 AM, Mathias Schindler
<mathias.schindler at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 24, 2013 at 8:29 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.
>>
>> Are there open source MT efforts that are close enough to merit
>> scrutiny?
>
> http://www.statmt.org/moses/ is live an kicking. Someone with a
> background in computer linguistics should have a close look at them.
>
> I would like to mention however that there are a couple of cases in
...
> In any case, I would love to see WMF engage in the topic of machine translation.

thanks a lot erik and mathias for this constructive input! i'd love to
see that too, and, from a volunteer standpoint, not only financing
further development seems adicting, but also training (eg
http://www.statmt.org/moses/?n=FactoredTraining.PrepareTraining)
seems to be something bite-sized which might fit the wiki-model and
the wikimedia volunteer community structure quite well.

 rupert.