AMTA 2002: From Research to Real Users Ever since the showdown between
Empiricists and Rationalists a decade ago at TMI 92, MT researchers have
hotly pursued promising paradigms for MT, including da- driven
approaches (e.g., statistical, example-based) and hybrids that integrate
these with more traditional rule-based components. During the same
period, commercial MT systems with standard transfer archit- tures have
evolved along a parallel and almost unrelated track, increasing their
cov- age (primarily through manual update of their lexicons, we assume)
and achieving much broader acceptance and usage, principally through the
medium of the Internet. Webpage translators have become commonplace; a
number of online translation s- vices have appeared, including in their
offerings both raw and postedited MT; and large corporations have been
turning increasingly to MT to address the exigencies of global
communication. Still, the output of the transfer-based systems employed
in this expansion represents but a small drop in the ever-growing
translation marketplace bucket.