DEVELOPMENTS IN MT RESEARCH IN THE UNITED-STATES

The paper argues that the IBM statistical approach to machine translat ion has done rather better after a few years than many sceptics believ ed it could. However, it is neither as novel as its proponents suggest nor is it making claims as clear and simple as they would have us bel ieve. The performance of the purely statistical system (and we discuss what that phrase could mean) has not equalled the performance of SYST RAN. More importantly, the system is now being shifted to a hybrid tha t incorporates much of the linguistic information that it was initiall y claimed by IBM would not be needed for MT. Hence, one might infer th at its own proponents do not believe 'pure' statistics sufficient for MT of a usable quality. In addition to real limits on the statistical method, there are also strong economic limits imposed by their methodo logy of data gathering. However, the paper concludes that the IBM grou p have done the field a great service in pushing these methods far fur ther than before, and by reminding everyone of the virtues of empirici sm in the field and the need for large scale gathering of data.