Today the NY Times had an interesting story about the changing web. It is growing massively in volume, from petabytes to zettabytes to yottabytes in fact according to Cisco, who also estimates that video will account for 90 percent of all Internet traffic by 2013.This growing use of video content will likely drive change in many business functions as well e.g. customer support, training, marketing and even basic product communications.
So what does this huge growth in video content mean for those of us in the professional translation industry?
-- The business value of user documentation and “corporate-speak filled websites” will increasingly diminish.
-- Leading edge corporations will increasingly move to using video to help sell, support and inform their global customers about their products and services.
-- This is both an opportunity and a threat to the professional industry and those who learn how to do do video well will likely emerge as leaders.
-- I think that this will only intensify the demand for increased use of automation = MT, but I think that there will also be an increased need for more effective collaborative networks.
-- I think that this will only intensify the demand for increased use of automation = MT, but I think that there will also be an increased need for more effective collaborative networks.
So while I can’t really say a whole lot more about how video will impact the translation industry I thought it would be valuable to gather some of the best video content I know of on MT or translation automation on the web and share the links. I have tried to keep it to the best (sound/video) sources.
I do not know of many (any) sources for any RbMT related presentations so please let me know or mention them in the comments if you know of any. (The one that I did have from TAUS has been removed from the site.)
Philipp Koehn of University of Edinburgh & Asia Online: Excellent overview on the basics of Statistical Machine Translation and how SMT works, and also covers the automatic evaluation methodology. This is a great primer for somebody who wants to understand the basics of SMT as described by a world expert on the subject.
Franz Och of Google on the state of Google SMT:
Some highlights include:
o Portuguese is their best single system in terms of BLEU scores
o Huge data: over 1 B words on many LPs and even Finnish improves as you get to 1B words
o Google will make 10 Euro LPs LM also available with 100B words/LP in 5 grams available soon via LDC
o GOOG has much more demand on English to X than the other way around
o GOOG is building a Yiddish system using linguistic bridges to German / Polish / Hebrew has made it possible to develop an SMT system
o GOOG is working on long-distance reordering /dependencies using syntax & two-pass before translation
o Anaphora / topic identification / non-local word disambiguation is also under development
o Handling target language morphology is a major challenge
o They are trying to develop reliability and confidence measures
o Training attempts to focus only on BLEU maximization – they wants to make a way to do machine learning that can optimize on many dimensions
o GOOG wants to develop interactive MT and translation as a dialogue - editing
o GOOG wants to get to 100 LPs in the next few years
Dion Wiggins Presentation from the December 2009 Thailand Conference on why we continue to care about MT and about emerging models for man-machine collaboration.
Jost Zetsche on the “Reconvergence of MT and TM: he explains how machine translation has rapidly evolved from a separate, quite isolated technology into a new concept that is very much integrated in other translation tools and systems used by human translators. Thus while it cannot be said the MT works well in every language there is a growing body of translators who have actually experienced productivity benefits.
Asia Online Presentation from webinar on Why LSPs should be interested in MT. (Requires registration)
Asia Online & Moravia Presentation from webinar on MT use in Customer Support applications. There is a great summary by Jenia Lazlo if you want to get the gist of it without watching.
Another presentation on The State of the Art of SMT from Ronald Kuhn.
The Bay Area MT User Group has also put up some presentations on the experience that Autodesk & Sun has had with the Moses Opens Source SMT technology. I do believe that you need to become a member first.
The Bay Area MT User Group has also put up some presentations on the experience that Autodesk & Sun has had with the Moses Opens Source SMT technology. I do believe that you need to become a member first.
Please let me know if you know of other video material that could be included in this list.
Kirti, these are fantastic resources - awesome links and I will be putting a chunk of time aside to watch the videos once I'm back in US on a better internet connection. Thank you for sharing!
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