Participants: Philipp Koehn, Septina Dian Larasati, Valtezs Sics, Bushra Jawaid, Nathan Green, Michael Arcan, Firoj Alam
Agenda
The typical research method in statistical machine translation is what Adam Lopez once called a "cargo cult". Somewhat motivated changes are implemented to the baseline system, the test set is re-translated, and if the BLEU score goes up, then ritual song-and-dance paper writing is performed.
However, it may be good to know a bit more what is going on in the statistical machine translation system, why it arrived at certain translation, what are the main outstanding problems, etc.
There has been some effort, among others, to integrate more visualization and analysis into the web-based interface of experiment.perl. But more can be done.