Machine Translation: Its Scope and Limits

✍ Scribed by Yorick Wilks

• Publisher: Springer
• Year: 2008
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 246
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Machine Translation (MT) is both an engineering technology and a measure of all things to do with languages and computers—whenever a new theory of language or linguistics is offered, an important criteria for its success is whether or not it will improve machine translation.

This book presents a history of machine translation (MT) from the point of view of a major writer and innovator in the subject. It describes and contrasts a range of approaches to the challenges and problems of this remarkable technology by means of a combination of historic papers along with commentaries to update their significance, both at the time of their writing and now. This volume chronicles the evolution of conflicting approaches to MT towards a somewhat skeptical consensus on future progress. Also included is a discussion of the most recent developments in the field and prospects for the future, which have been much changed by the arrival of the World Wide Web.

✦ Table of Contents

0387727736......Page 1
Contents......Page 8
1. Introduction......Page 10
Part I: MT Past......Page 17
2. Five Generations of MT......Page 18
3. An Artificial Intelligence Approach to Machine Translation......Page 33
4. It Works but How Far Can It Go: Evaluating the SYSTRAN MT System......Page 70
Part II: MT Present......Page 92
5. Where Am I Coming From: The Reversibility of Analysis and Generation in Natural Language Processing......Page 93
6. What are Interlinguas for MT: Natural Languages, Logics or Arbitrary Notations?......Page 101
7. Stone Soup and the French Room: The Statistical Approach to MT at IBM......Page 104
8. The Revival of US Government MT Research in 1990......Page 117
9. The Role of Linguistic Knowledge Resources in MT......Page 126
10. The Automatic Acquisition of Lexicons for an MT System......Page 139
Part III: MT Future......Page 155
11. Senses and Texts......Page 156
12. Sense Projection......Page 168
13. Lexical Tuning......Page 175
14. What Would Pragmatics-Based Machine Translation be Like?......Page 192
15. Where was MT at the End of the Century: What Works and What Doesn't?......Page 211
16. The Future of MT in the New Millennium......Page 220
References......Page 232
B......Page 241
H......Page 242
L......Page 243
P......Page 244
S......Page 245
Y......Page 246