[Corpora-List] Man bites dog

[Mike Maxwell]

In LILT 6 (http://elanguage.net/journals/index.php/lilt/issue/current), 
"Zipf's Law and l'Arbitraire du Signe," Martin Kay discusses statistical 
MT, and says (p.22):

    Notice that a language model would, and should, guarantee
    that the French “homme mord chien” would be translated into
    English as “dog bites man”, rather than “man bites dog”,
    which is what it really means.

I once proposed this exact example (with Spanish rather than French) to 
a computational linguist who knew more about MT than I do.  (People who 
know more about MT than I do are quite common.  Ok, they're quite common 
among computational linguists :-).)  That person suggested I needed to 
learn more about MT.

It would be nice to find myself making the same mistake that Martin Kay 
made.  It would be even nicer if it weren't a mistake.

Is Kay's claim correct?  The context is of course pure statistical MT, 
not hybrid rule/ statistical systems.  Assume that the pair "homme mord 
chien"/ "man bites dog" never occurs in the training data, but that the 
reverse does (or at least that "dog bites man" appears on the English 
side, presumably with some significant frequency).
-- 
	Mike Maxwell
	maxwell at umiacs.umd.edu
	"My definition of an interesting universe is
	one that has the capacity to study itself."
         --Stephen Eastmond

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