Keynote Address Some notes on the state of the art: Where are we now in MT: what works and what doesn’t? And the role of MT as an international collaborative activity

The paper examines briefly the impact of the “statistical turn” in machine translation (MT) R&D in the last decade, and particularly the way in which it has made large scale language resources (lexicons, text corpora etc.) more important than ever before and reinforced the role of evaluation in the development of the field. But resources mean, almost by definition, co-operation between groups and, in the case of MT, specifically co-operation between language groups and states. The paper then considers what alternatives there are now for MT R&D. One is to continue with interlingual methods of translation, even though those are not normally thought of as close to statistical methods. The reason is that statistical methods, taken alone, have almost certainly reached a ceiling in terms of the proportion of sentences and linguistic phenomena they can translate successfully. Interlingual methods remain popular within large electronics companies in Japan, and in a large US Government funded project (PANGLOSS). The question then discussed is what role there can be for interlinguas and interlingual methods in co-operation in MT across linguistic and national boundaries. The paper then turns to evaluation and asks whether, across national and continental boundaries, it can become a co-operative or a “hegemonic” enterprise. Finally the paper turns to resources themselves and asks why cooperation on resources is proving so hard, even though there are bright spots of real co-operation.