scholarly journals A Critique of Statistical Machine Translation

Author(s):  
Andy Way

Phrase-Based Statistical Machine Translation (PB-SMT) is clearly the leading paradigm in the field today. Nevertheless—and this may come as some surprise to the PB-SMT community—most translators and, somewhat more surprisingly perhaps, many experienced MT protagonists find the basic model extremely difficult to understand. The main aim of this paper, therefore, is to discuss why this might be the case. Our basic thesis is that proponents of PB-SMT do not seek to address any community other than their own, for they do not feel any need to do so. We demonstrate that this was not always the case; on the contrary, when statistical models of trans-lation were first presented, the language used to describe how such a model might work was very conciliatory, and inclusive. Over the next five years, things changed considerably; once SMT achieved dominance particularly over the rule-based paradigm, it had established a position where it did not need to bring along the rest of the MT community with it, and in our view, this has largely pertained to this day. Having discussed these issues, we discuss three additional issues: the role of automatic MT evaluation metrics when describing PB-SMT systems; the recent syntactic embellishments of PB-SMT, noting especially that most of these contributions have come from researchers who have prior experience in fields other than statistical models of translation; and the relationship between PB-SMT and other models of translation, suggesting that there are many gains to be had if the SMT community were to open up more to the other MT paradigms.

Author(s):  
Lisa Waddington

This chapter examines the role of the judiciary with regard to the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). It considers the relationship which the judiciary have or appear to perceive themselves as having with the CRPD and explores some of the factors seemingly prompting courts to refer to it. The first section reflects on: whether judges are able to choose to refer to the Convention or have a legal duty to do so; the significance of the fact that the CRPD is international law; and whether judges appear to see themselves merely as domestic actors, or as agents or trustees of the CRPD. The second section explores whether judges are referring to the CRPD in response to arguments raised before the court or doing so of their own volition. Also considered are the relevance of amicus curiae interventions; reasons for referral related to the domestic legal system; and the role of particularly engaged individuals.


Author(s):  
Miriam Bak McKenna

Abstract Situating itself in current debates over the international legal archive, this article delves into the material and conceptual implications of architecture for international law. To do so I trace the architectural developments of international law’s organizational and administrative spaces during the early to mid twentieth century. These architectural endeavours unfolded in three main stages: the years 1922–1926, during which the International Labour Organization (ILO) building, the first building exclusively designed for an international organization was constructed; the years 1927–1937 which saw the great polemic between modernist and classical architects over the building of the Palace of Nations; and the years 1947–1952, with the triumph of modernism, represented by the UN Headquarters in New York. These events provide an illuminating allegorical insight into the physical manifestation, modes of self-expression, and transformation of international law during this era, particularly the relationship between international law and the function and role of international organizations.


2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (10) ◽  
pp. 13861-13862
Author(s):  
Zhiming Li ◽  
Qing Wu ◽  
Kun Qian

Reverse Engineering has been an extremely important field in software engineering, it helps us to better understand and analyze the internal architecture and interrealtions of executables. Classical Java reverse engineering task includes disassembly and decompilation. Traditional Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) based disassemblers and decompilers are strictly rule defined and thus highly fault intolerant when bytecode obfuscation were introduced for safety concern. In this work, we view decompilation as a statistical machine translation task and propose a decompilation framework which is fully based on self-attention mechanism. Through better adaption to the linguistic uniqueness of bytecode, our model fully outperforms rule-based models and previous works based on recurrence mechanism.


2004 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 123-162 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sharon Rodrick

This article begins by outlining what the principle of open justice is intended to achieve. It then investigates the nature of the relationship that exists between the courts and the media, and between the media and the public, and suggests that these relationships are not always conducive to realising the aims of open justice. While the reporting role of the traditional news media will undoubtedly persist, at least for the foreseeable future, it is argued that, since courts now have the means to deliver to the public a fuller and truer picture of their work than the media can, they should seize the opportunity to do so.


2020 ◽  
Vol 51 (4) ◽  
pp. 305-322 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andreas T Hirblinger ◽  
Dana M Landau

‘Inclusion’ has emerged as a prominent theme in peacemaking. However, its exact meaning remains vague, as do assumptions about the relationship between inclusion and peace. This article seeks to problematize the research, policy and practice of inclusion. Focusing on United Nations (UN) peacemaking, we ask how the object of inclusion has been framed, and based on what strategies and underlying rationales. We do so against the backdrop of emerging debates about an agonistic peace, which suggest that violent antagonistic relationships can be overcome if peace processes enable contestation between adversaries. This requires that peacemakers recognize the constitutive role of difference in political settlements. We identify three distinct strategies for inclusion, with corresponding framings of the included. Firstly, inclusion can be used to build a more legitimate peace; secondly, to empower and protect specific actor groups; and thirdly, to transform the sociopolitical structures that underlie conflict. The first strategy frames the included in open terms that can accommodate a heterogeneity of actors, the second in closed terms pertaining to specific identity traits, and the third in relational terms emerging within a specific social, cultural and political context. In practice, this leads to tensions in the operationalization of inclusion, which are evidence of an inchoate attempt to politicize peace processes. In response, we argue for an approach to relational inclusion that recognizes the power relations from which difference emerges; neither brushing over difference, nor essentializing single identity traits, but rather remaining flexible in navigating a larger web of relationships that require transformation.


1996 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 202-211 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kim Lützén ◽  
António Barbosa da Silva

The main purpose of this article is to discuss the place of the ethics of virtues and char acter in nursing and health care in general, and in psychiatric nursing in particular. To attain this goal, the relationship between the ethics of duty (i.e. rule based ethics) and the ethics of virtue and character will be clarified in order to defend our main hypothe sis that these two types of ethics should complement each other, since both are necessary but neither by itself is sufficient for nursing. This means that any applied ethics, as in nursing, should consider the importance of the agent's moral character. To support our arguments, we shall use cases from the empirical reality of psychiatric and mental health care.


Author(s):  
Jared Alan Gray ◽  
Thomas E. Ford

AbstractAn experiment supported our hypotheses about the relationship between the social context in which sexist humor is delivered and the adoption of a non-critical humor mindset to interpret it. First, a professional workplace setting implied a local norm that is more prohibitive of sexist jokes than the general societal norm, whereas a comedy club implied a local norm of greater approval of sexist jokes. Second, offensiveness ratings revealed that participants were less likely to adopt a non-critical humor mindset to interpret sexist jokes delivered in a professional workplace setting and more likely to do so in a comedy club setting, compared to a setting governed by only the general societal norm. Finally, meditational analyses revealed that participants used the local norm of acceptability of sexist jokes to determine whether they could interpret the jokes in a non-critical humor mindset.


Author(s):  
Anjana Saxena

The transition to digital is changing the music industry. As technology has advanced over recent years, the music industry has consequently undergone a drastic change in the way it operates. This industry-wide shift has its pros and its cons: On one hand, the internet serves as an incredible platform on which anyone can exhibit their talent and potentially build a fan base. On the other hand, the presence of millions of people attempting to do so make it more and more difficult for any one person to stand out, and the reality of file sharing and illegal downloading makes the financial aspect of music much more complex. Regardless of one`s opinion about the road that the music industry has traveled down, a music manager must be flexible enough to keep up with the changes that the industry undergoes. The meaning and role of a “manager” has changed drastically over the last decade as the traditional business model has given way to the “new” music business Traditionally a manager managed an artist’s efforts to get signed to a label and once signed, he/she managed the relationship between the artist and the label. But given the state of labels today the unsigned artist must assume that he/she will never be signed and build a career accordingly. A traditional manager is often unable and ill – equipped to successfully manage and develop an artist’s career in the new environment.


2021 ◽  
Vol 65 (1) ◽  
pp. 169-196
Author(s):  
Lech Górniak ◽  

The paper includes analysis of the results of field studies conducted among employees of 20 organizations (N=601). The analyses were aimed at determining the impact of organizational culture has on the relationships between the “soft” (psychological and social) factors that characterize them. In particular the impact of organizational culture was considered on the relationship between the antecedents and outcomes of organizational trust. The statistical method used was moderation analysis (Hayes, 2018). The studies were based on a questionnaire that included 13 scales as measures for the variables considered. The analyses provides two main conclusions. The first is for researchers dealing with the soft aspects of the organization’s functioning, especially those related to the role of trust in the organization. The second is addressed to practitioners and relates to the quality of knowledge on employee management. The conclusion for the researchers concerns the need to take into account the specificity of a given organization when describing organizational phenomena. This concerns the tacit factors that go beyond the standard characteristics (industry type, size of the organization, number of employees, etc.), in particular those aspects of the organizational culture related to organizational trust. The failure to do so may lead to inadequate advice for executives regarding the methods used to develop the organization’s potential. The conclusion for practitioners is the need to pay attention to how employees perceive the organizational culture of their company. The omission of this fact may adversely affect the strategy of building a climate of trust, which can lead to a decrease in teamwork quality and a reduction in the superior-subordinate relationship.


2019 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 267-292 ◽  
Author(s):  
Akiko Eriguchi ◽  
Kazuma Hashimoto ◽  
Yoshimasa Tsuruoka

Neural machine translation (NMT) has shown great success as a new alternative to the traditional Statistical Machine Translation model in multiple languages. Early NMT models are based on sequence-to-sequence learning that encodes a sequence of source words into a vector space and generates another sequence of target words from the vector. In those NMT models, sentences are simply treated as sequences of words without any internal structure. In this article, we focus on the role of the syntactic structure of source sentences and propose a novel end-to-end syntactic NMT model, which we call a tree-to-sequence NMT model, extending a sequence-to-sequence model with the source-side phrase structure. Our proposed model has an attention mechanism that enables the decoder to generate a translated word while softly aligning it with phrases as well as words of the source sentence. We have empirically compared the proposed model with sequence-to-sequence models in various settings on Chinese-to-Japanese and English-to-Japanese translation tasks. Our experimental results suggest that the use of syntactic structure can be beneficial when the training data set is small, but is not as effective as using a bi-directional encoder. As the size of training data set increases, the benefits of using a syntactic tree tends to diminish.


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