[MT-List] Big software companies and MT

[Cremers LMG]

Perhaps one way to achieve to some extent a reasonable
comparison between MT systems is, to select a group
of current MT users with different systems, have them run
a test set designed for this purpose, under specific 
conditions. 

This shouldn't be too expensive to do.

Lou Cremers

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> -----Original Message-----
> From: Robert Frederking 
> [mailto:Robert_Frederking@mlist-3.sp.cs.cmu.edu]
> Sent: Monday, February 19, 2001 7:22 PM
> To: John Kohl
> Cc: 'MT-list@eamt.org'
> Subject: Re: [MT-List] Big software companies and MT 
> 
> 
> > The ISLE framework is interesting, but what I need/want is 
> not just a
> > list of criteria and considerations, but the facts as they 
> pertain to
> > the different vendors' products. I think -that- information 
> is a long
> > way from being made readily available.
> 
> This is an interesting point.  I have run into this problem in trying
> to teach our graduate MT course's lecture on "Commercial MT systems".
> It's very difficult to get concrete, useful information from MT
> vendors (other than that "ours is the best, you should buy it").
> 
> Since (it seems to me) any such information will necessarily be all
> wrapped up in marketting issues, I wonder how it would be possible to
> get straight, reliable information on a range of companies.  (That is,
> every company clearly wants to look like they are the best.)  I know
> there has been some discussion of some kind of Consumer Reports for
> MT, but this is bound to be expensive to do (independently) in a
> serious way.
> 
> I find myself wondering whether anything like this exists for other
> commercial software fields.  I suspect not, actually.  After all, any
> serious quality comparison would be damaging to Microsoft.  :-)
> 
> So, is there any reliable, independent assessment of commercial
> software in other fields?  If so, how do they manage to do it?  (Or is
> it perhaps easier to evaluate other software copared to MT systems?)
> 
> 	Bob
> --
> Robert E. Frederking			Senior Systems Scientist	
> Language Technologies Institute/Center for Machine Translation
> Carnegie Mellon University
> 5000 Forbes Avenue			Telephone: +1-412-268-6656
> Pittsburgh, PA 15213  USA		FAX: +1-412-268-6298
> Email: ref@cs.cmu.edu			WWW: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~ref/
> 
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