What is Example-Based Machine Translation?

We maintain that the essential feature that characterizes a Machine Translation approach and sets it apart from other approaches is the kind of knowledge it uses. From this perspective, we argue that Example-Based Machine Translation is sometimes characterized in terms of nonessential features. We show that Example-Based Machine Translation, as long as it is linguistically principled, significantly overlaps with other linguistically principled approaches to Machine Translation. We make a proposal for translation knowledge bases that make such an overlap explicit. We relate our proposal to translation by analogy, which stands out as an inherently example-based technique.