Machine Translation: Its Scope and Limits

✍ Scribed by Yorick Wilks (auth.)

• Publisher: Springer US
• Year: 2009
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 246
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Machine Translation is the author’s comprehensive view of machine translation (MT) from the perspective of a participant in its history and development. The text considers MT as a fundamental part of Artificial Intelligence and the ultimate test-bed for all computational linguistics, covering historical and contemporary systems in Europe, the US and Japan.

The author describes and contrasts a range of approaches to MT’s challenges and problems, and shows the evolution of conflicting approaches to MT towards some kind of skeptical consensus on future progress. The volume includes historic papers, updated with commentaries detailing their significance both at the time of their writing and now. The book concludes with 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.

Anyone interested in the progress of science and technology, particularly computer scientists and students, will find this a fascinating exploration of MT technology.

Yorick Wilks is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Sheffield, where he directs the Institute for Language, Speech and Hearing. He received his M.A. and Ph.D. (1968) from Pembroke College, Cambridge. He has also taught or researched at Stanford, Edinburgh, Geneva, Essex and New Mexico State Universities. His interests are artificial intelligence and the computer processing of language, knowledge and belief. He is a Fellow of the European and American Societies for Artificial Intelligence, a Fellow of the EPSRC College of Computing and a member of the UK Computing Research Council.

Wilks was awarded the Antonio Zampolli prize by the European Language Resources Association in 2008. This prize is given to individuals whose work lies within the areas of Language Resources and Language Technology Evaluation with acknowledged contributions to their advancements. He was also the recipient of an ACL Life Achievement Award at the 46th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics in 2008.

✦ Table of Contents

Front Matter....Pages I-X
Front Matter....Pages 1-1
Introduction....Pages 1-7
Front Matter....Pages 9-9
Five Generations of MT....Pages 11-25
An Artificial Intelligence Approach to Machine Translation....Pages 27-63
It Works but How Far Can It Go: Evaluating the SYSTRAN MT System....Pages 65-86
Front Matter....Pages 87-87
Where Am I Coming From: The Reversibility of Analysis and Generation in Natural Language Processing....Pages 89-96
What are Interlinguas for MT: Natural Languages, Logics or Arbitrary Notations?....Pages 97-99
Stone Soup and the French Room: The Statistical Approach to MT at IBM....Pages 101-113
The Revival of US Government MT Research in 1990....Pages 115-123
The Role of Linguistic Knowledge Resources in MT....Pages 125-137
The Automatic Acquisition of Lexicons for an MT System....Pages 139-154
Front Matter....Pages 155-155
Senses and Texts....Pages 157-168
Sense Projection....Pages 169-175
Lexical Tuning....Pages 177-193
What Would Pragmatics-Based Machine Translation be Like?....Pages 195-213
Where was MT at the End of the Century: What Works and What Doesn’t?....Pages 215-223
The Future of MT in the New Millennium....Pages 225-236
Back Matter....Pages 237-252

✦ Subjects

Artificial Intelligence (incl. Robotics); Language Translation and Linguistics; History of Computing; Information Storage and Retrieval; Probability and Statistics in Computer Science