Makefiles for Moses

Building MT systems with the Moses toolkit is a task so complex that it is rarely done manually. Over the years, several frameworks for building, running, and evaluating Moses systems have been developed, most notably the Experiment Management System (EMS). While EMS works well for standard experimental set-ups and offers good web integration, designing new experimental set-ups within EMS is not trivial, especially when the new processing pipeline differs considerably from the kind EMS is intended for. In this paper, I present M4M (Makefiles for Moses), a framework for building and evaluating Moses MT systems with the GNU Make utility. I illustrate the capabilities by a simple set-up that builds and compares two different systems with common resources. This set-up requires little more than putting training, tuning and evaluation data into the right directories and running Make.1 The purpose of this paper is twofold: to guide first-time users of Moses through the process of building baseline MT systems, and to discuss some lesser-known features of the Make utility that enable the MT practitioner to set up complex experimental scenarios efficiently. M4M is part of the Moses distribution.