tekom-Jahrestagung 2012 - ActiveDoc

Sprachtechnologie / Language Technology
LT 13
Presentation
A (terminology) service layer for Moses SMT
Nathalie De Sutter, Joachim Van den Bogaert, CrossLang, Gent, Belgium
Introduction
Moses SMT is finding its way to localization providers thanks to its
promise of cheap (Open Source) and fast Machine Translation (MT).
With the numerous internet sources that walk novice users through
their first steps, setting up and training Moses SMT, has become increasingly
straightforward. An active community of researchers, developers
and professional users provides additional support on Moses SMT’s
mailing list. However, when it comes to deploying Moses in a live production
environment, there is very little documentation to be found.
Very likely, this is due to the proprietary nature of professional thirdparty
Moses SMT-based solutions: people prefer valuable insights to
remain unpublished. There are of course some Open Source one-man
efforts, but the usability of these kinds of solutions is restricted to a
prototyping environment, or at best a human-operated batch system. A
more trivial reason for the lack of information on live Moses SMT systems,
may be that publications on setting up Moses properly tend to get
technical, boring, and without any scientific value: there is no honour
in making a great system behave nicely. A final reason for the lack of
deployment information is that re-engineering Moses SMT is not a hot
topic anymore. A couple of years ago it might have been, but currently,
there are companies out there that sell pre-installed machines ready for
use, so why would users invest in well-engineered solutions, let alone
report on all the well-known technologies integrated in such a system
(load balancing, scheduling, multi-threading, service-oriented architectures,
upscaling, outscaling, decoupling, …)?
Project requirements
Still, we believe that a production and processing framework around
Moses SMT adds value, for two reasons:
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Changing market demands: we see that customers are not satisfied
anymore with a solution that actually runs, has a nice front-end or
allows them to execute data training with a user-friendly GUI. Nowadays,
users want difficult languages via hybrid solutions, integrated
terminology management and post-editor friendly output. In the near
future we expect systems combination with real-time quality assessment
to be in demand. Putting all this on top of Moses SMT requires
a well crafted environment.
−−
Flexibility and maintenance: a customized Moses SMT solution needs
to be adaptable to a customer’s demands. If improved translations are
required by adding extra processing or linguistic modules, MT technology
providers need to be able to offer such kind of solutions. At the
same time, changes to a system should be portable to other systems
and remain manageable in terms of maintenance.
To be able to deal with these requirements, we developed a framework
around Moses SMT which facilitates production and the development
of extra processing tasks. In what follows, we will give a brief account of
the design decisions we took to implement this framework.
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tekom-Jahrestagung 2012