Grammatical disambiguation – i.e. whether ‘maintenant’ is and adverb (now) or the gerundive (maintaining) of the verb ‘maintenir’ – seems to be the crucial issue for the adoption of the rule-based model or statistical model for machine translation. This problem is widespread and seems to concern all languages. For the French language, this problem of grammatical disambiguation concerns about 1 word out of 7. Effective grammatical disambiguation is difficult to implement. The advantage of adopting the statistical method for grammatical disambiguation is that the same method can be generalized and used for several languages. In the case of the rule-based model, the module of grammatical disambiguation must be rewritten for each language, which generates considerable complexity and requires a very significant development time. Therefore, a rule-based method for grammatical disambiguation that can be easily applied to several languages would be of great interest. This seems to be the main difficulty that rule-based machine translation is designed to overcome.

But if we want an artificial intelligence that not only provides an (mostly accurate) answer without being able to really explain its reasoning, but is truly able to emulate human reasoning and to justify and describe step by step the reasoning that leads to its answer, then it is worth the effort.