Good applications for crummy machine translation

Ideally, we might hope to improve the performance of our MT systems by improving the system, but it might be even more important to improve performance by looking for a more appropriate application. A survey of the literature on evaluation of MT systems seems to suggest that the success of the evaluation often depends very strongly on the selection of an appropriate application. If the application is well-chosen, then it often becomes fairly clear how the system should be evaluated. Moreover, the evaluation is likely to make the system look good. Conversely, if the application is not clearly identified (or worse, if the application is poorly chosen), then it is often very difficult to find a satisfying evaluation paradigm. We begin our discussion with a brief review of some evaluation metrics that have been tried in the past and conclude that it is difficult to identify a satisfying evaluation paradigm that will make sense over all possible applications. It is probably wise to identify the application first, and then we will be in a much better position to address evaluation questions. The discussion will then turn to the main point, an essay on how to pick a good niche application for state-of-the-art (crummy) machine translation.