[Corpora-List] Man bites dog

[Mark Lybrand]

My french is rusty, but spanish would have a disambuation by prefixing the
accustive with a preposition:
E
Hombre muerde a perro. (Articles omitted to correspond better with the
example)

Mark
On Nov 20, 2011 7:16 PM, "Mike Maxwell" <maxwell at umiacs.umd.edu> wrote:

> In LILT 6 (http://elanguage.net/**journals/index.php/lilt/issue/**current<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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