I agree about word2vec and embeddings in general- they're meant to represent meaning or capture something of it anyway. I'm just not convinced that they work that well in that respect. Maybe I can say how king and queen are analogous to man and woman etc, but that doesn't help me if I don't know what king, queen, man or woman mean. I don't think it's possible to represent the meaning of words by looking at their collocation with other words- whose meaning is also supposedly represented by their collocation with other words etc.
I confess I haven't used any machine translation systems other than google translate. For instance, I've never used deepl.com. I'll give it a try since you recommend it although my use case would be to translate technical terms that I only know in English to my native Greek and I don't think anything can handle that use case very well at all. Not even humans!
Out of curiousity, you say neural machine translation is better than earlier techniques, which I think is not controversial. But, have you tried such earlier systems? I've never had the chance.
I agree about word2vec and embeddings in general- they're meant to represent meaning or capture something of it anyway. I'm just not convinced that they work that well in that respect. Maybe I can say how king and queen are analogous to man and woman etc, but that doesn't help me if I don't know what king, queen, man or woman mean. I don't think it's possible to represent the meaning of words by looking at their collocation with other words- whose meaning is also supposedly represented by their collocation with other words etc.
I confess I haven't used any machine translation systems other than google translate. For instance, I've never used deepl.com. I'll give it a try since you recommend it although my use case would be to translate technical terms that I only know in English to my native Greek and I don't think anything can handle that use case very well at all. Not even humans!
Out of curiousity, you say neural machine translation is better than earlier techniques, which I think is not controversial. But, have you tried such earlier systems? I've never had the chance.