Machine translation: from real users to research

The previous conference in this series (AMTA 2002) took up the theme “From Research to Real Users”, and sought to explore why recent research on data-driven machine translation didn’t seem to be moving to the marketplace. As it turned out, the ? rst commercial products of the data-driven research movement were just over the horizon, andintheinterveningtwoyearstheyhavebeguntoappearinthemarketplace. Atthesame time, rule-basedmachinetranslationsystemsareintroducingdata-driventechniquesinto the mix in their products. Machine translation as a software application has a 50-year history. There are an increasing number of exciting deployments of MT, many of which will be exhibited and discussed at the conference. But the scale of commercial use has never approached the estimates of the latent demand. In light of this, we reversed the question from AMTA 2002, to look at the next step in the path to commercial success for MT. We took user needs as our theme, and explored how or whether market requirements are feeding into research programs. The transition of research discoveries to practical use involves te- nicalquestionsthatarenotassexyasthosethathavedriventheresearchcommunityand research funding. Important product issues such as system customizability, computing resource requirements, and usability and ? tness for particular tasks need to engage the creativeenergiesofallpartsofourcommunity, especiallyresearch, aswemovemachine translation from a niche application to a more pervasive language conversion process. Thesetopicswereaddressedattheconferencethroughthepaperscontainedinthesep- ceedings, and even more speci? cally through several invited presentations and panels.