Four technical and organizational keys to handle more languages and improve quality (on demand) in MT

Despite considerable investment over the past 50 years, only a small number of language pairs is covered by MT systems designed for information access, and even fewer are capable of quality translation or speech translation. To open the door toward MT of adequate quality for all languages (at least in principle), we propose four keys. On the technical side, we should (1) dramatically increase the use of learning techniques which have demonstrated their potential at the research level, and (2) use pivot architectures, the most universally usable pivot being UNL. On the organizational side, the keys are (3) the cooperative development of open source linguistic resources on the Web, and (4) the construction of systems where quality can be improved "on demand" by users, either a priori through interactive disambiguation, or a posteriori by correcting the pivot representation through any language, thereby unifying MT, computer-aided authoring, and multilingual generation.

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