An Overview of EBMT

Abstract

In the last ten years there has been a significant amount of research in Machine Translation within a “new” paradigm of empirical approaches, often labelled collectively as “Example-based” approaches. The first manifestation of this approach caused some surprise and hostility among observers more used to different ways of working, but the techniques were quickly adopted and adapted by many researchers, often creating hybrid systems. This paper reviews the various research efforts within this paradigm reported to date, and attempts a categorisation of different manifestations of the general approach. This paper first appeared in Machine Translation 14 (1999), 113–157. It has been updated with a small number of revisions, and references to more recent work.