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83f0fd6a9a3ff55996987777073285d00a8962d1 | 244077614 | null | Present interest in mechanical translation | On November 30, 1950, WFL sent out a letter of inquiry on the subject of Mechanical Translation to various men in the field. Their answers are now in, and the following is WFL's attempt at summarizing the present status of this problem as it is being tackled in both Europe and America. I. Men who are actually doing something, roughly in order of their activity. | {
"name": [
"Loomis, W. F."
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} | null | null | Proceedings of the Conference on Mechanical Translation | 1952-06-01 | 0 | 0 | null | Booth writes that Richens' approach deals mainly with dictionary translation plus explanation which enables account to be taken of word endings in accordance with standard grammar also contained in the dictionary. He says that Richens is the most notable worker in MT in England.Calvin Mooers of the Zator Company writes that when he was recently in England he was told by Mr. R. A. Fairthorn of the Royal Aircraft Establishment, Farnborough, Hampshire, England, that Dr. Richens had actually operated a tabulating machine to do translation by printing the multiple equivalents.Williams writes that before tackling any hardware experiments they decided to survey the field in a series of small studies. The first of these was entitled "An Experimental Study of Ambiguity and Context," by Abraham Kaplan, which they sent to us. At present they have no money for this work, as they feel such funds cannot rightly come from the Government but must come from an outside agency. | null | null | null | Huskey writes that he is interested in running pilot tests concerning MT on their SWAC. This machine has an internal memory of 256 words at present, which is being enlarged to 8,000 with a magnetic drum and even 100,000 with a magnetic tape unit. SWAC was not designed for non-numerical work, but Huskey feels that it will be useful for preliminary testing. He writes that formal work on this project stopped last September as they ran out of money. He has sparked both the Departments of Spanish and German at U.C.L.A. into making some paper and pencil studies of vocabulary ratios and syntax translation problems.The former studies on vocabulary ratios are being made by William E. Bull of the Department of Spanish, who has subsequently submitted a $2,000 request for a project to cover a full-time research assistant for eight months to complete the analysis.Victor A. Oswald, Jr., of the Department of German, has sent us a manuscript entitled "Proposals for the Mechanical Resolution of German Syntax Patterns," which indicates that syntax problems can be solved by using a numerical code to identify syntax functions and by employing mechanical routines resolving foreign syntax patterns into English ones. J. D. Williams has written us that Huskey is particularly interested in the hardware aspects of MT and is looking for jobs for his SWAC. He states that the above groups are starving and almost limited by the supply of paper and pencil.Booth writes that he is primarily interested at present in codifying words so as to utilize memory space most advantageously.Donald MacKay writes that Booth hopes to mechanize a dictionary by electronic means. | Main paper:
dr. a. d. booth, birkbeck college, london.:
Booth writes that he is primarily interested at present in codifying words so as to utilize memory space most advantageously.Donald MacKay writes that Booth hopes to mechanize a dictionary by electronic means.
dr. r. h. richens, institute of agricultural genetics, cambridge, england.:
Booth writes that Richens' approach deals mainly with dictionary translation plus explanation which enables account to be taken of word endings in accordance with standard grammar also contained in the dictionary. He says that Richens is the most notable worker in MT in England.Calvin Mooers of the Zator Company writes that when he was recently in England he was told by Mr. R. A. Fairthorn of the Royal Aircraft Establishment, Farnborough, Hampshire, England, that Dr. Richens had actually operated a tabulating machine to do translation by printing the multiple equivalents.
j. d. williams, rand corporation:
Williams writes that before tackling any hardware experiments they decided to survey the field in a series of small studies. The first of these was entitled "An Experimental Study of Ambiguity and Context," by Abraham Kaplan, which they sent to us. At present they have no money for this work, as they feel such funds cannot rightly come from the Government but must come from an outside agency.
:
Huskey writes that he is interested in running pilot tests concerning MT on their SWAC. This machine has an internal memory of 256 words at present, which is being enlarged to 8,000 with a magnetic drum and even 100,000 with a magnetic tape unit. SWAC was not designed for non-numerical work, but Huskey feels that it will be useful for preliminary testing. He writes that formal work on this project stopped last September as they ran out of money. He has sparked both the Departments of Spanish and German at U.C.L.A. into making some paper and pencil studies of vocabulary ratios and syntax translation problems.The former studies on vocabulary ratios are being made by William E. Bull of the Department of Spanish, who has subsequently submitted a $2,000 request for a project to cover a full-time research assistant for eight months to complete the analysis.Victor A. Oswald, Jr., of the Department of German, has sent us a manuscript entitled "Proposals for the Mechanical Resolution of German Syntax Patterns," which indicates that syntax problems can be solved by using a numerical code to identify syntax functions and by employing mechanical routines resolving foreign syntax patterns into English ones. J. D. Williams has written us that Huskey is particularly interested in the hardware aspects of MT and is looking for jobs for his SWAC. He states that the above groups are starving and almost limited by the supply of paper and pencil.
Appendix:
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5c9910a11e5ee5212ecf09e122e37da10c36a47d | 19613776 | null | Problems of vocabulary frequency and distribution | than in the procedures by which such information was obtained. To save valuable time for discussion, I shall make a few introductory and rather categorical statements especially pertinent to frequency problems in linguistics and to mechanical translation. If I sound dogmatic, the impression should be attributed to haste rather than intention. I shall begin by exposing four major fallacies which are current in most discussions of word frequencies: (I) The traditional vocabulary frequency studies, with which you are all familiar, are not primarily linguistic investigations. Neither the number of nouns in the Oxford Dictionary nor the frequency with which any English noun is used are basic linguistic facts. The total number of English nouns is a manifestation of the technological and cultural advancement of speakers of English (the language would be neither more English nor less English with an increase or decrease in the number of nouns), and the frequency of a noun like aspirin, for example, is simply a reflection of the headache rate of these speakers. Frequency studies of vocabulary are, consequently, not primarily language studies; they are investigations of human activities. Our conceptualization of the entire frequency problem is one thing if we ask "What is the frequency of 'vector' in the English language?" (a false linguistic frame of reference), and something quite different if we ask "What proportion of the total population, at what time intervals, has use for the word 'vector'?" Man if he talks at all, always talks about something specific and what word counters are trying 'to find out is what he talks about most, that is, how he distributes his time among all the possible things he might talk about. This leads us to the second fallacy. (II) If we are actually investigating, in frequency counts, the specific verbal activities of real people every utterance has space-time coordinates, that is, every speaker talks somewhere at some time. (Printed material is a fossil of this activity and becomes, as a result, ambiguous in space-time.) Now space and time, as elements of objective reality, determine human activity and, consequently, the frequency of word usage. The frequency potential of all words, then, depends upon the distribution of population in space and time. For example, the frequency of the word "rain" is undoubtedly much higher here in New England than in Southern California, first, because there are more people to use the word and, second, because it rains here more often. The total frequency of "rain" for these two regions represents neither area, no reality, and is obviously not a significant linguistic fact. There exists, if this principle is extended, no uniform vocabulary frequency potential for the language and an average is meaningless for any specific purpose. (III) There does not exist, nor can there be devised, a scientific method of sampling which will reveal anything reliable about word frequencies in a language as a whole. Actual speech (writing, etc.) has a linear structure. What I am saying now is coming at you word by word, serially, on a time line. A number of random segments of such linear speech cannot be welded together into a composite line which will represent any reality. A set of such examples is not even a satisfactory report on the specific material sampled. On an absurdly simple level, a linear weld of this kind produces something like the following three piece composite: "The special significance of vector analysis-in all Congregational Church socials-causes most hens to produce twice the normal number of eggs." The distribution of lexical items along this linear compound cannot possibly provide useful information about any extended segment of each compounding sample. Distribution and frequency have meaning only in terms of a homogeneous whole which is, theoretically, a non-existent entity in actual speech. (IV) The 80 per cent fallacy deserves special attention. It has been demonstrated by numerous | {
"name": [
"Bull, William E."
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"affiliation": [
null
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} | null | null | Proceedings of the Conference on Mechanical Translation | 1952-06-01 | 0 | 1 | null | PART I: Introduction: I assumed in preparing this report that this group would be more interested in conclusions and operational facts than in the procedures by which such information was obtained. To save valuable time for discussion, I shall make a few introductory and rather categorical statements especially pertinent to frequency problems in linguistics and to mechanical translation. If I sound dogmatic, the impression should be attributed to haste rather than intention.I shall begin by exposing four major fallacies which are current in most discussions of word frequencies:(I) The traditional vocabulary frequency studies, with which you are all familiar, are not primarily linguistic investigations. Neither the number of nouns in the Oxford Dictionary nor the frequency with which any English noun is used are basic linguistic facts. The total number of English nouns is a manifestation of the technological and cultural advancement of speakers of English (the language would be neither more English nor less English with an increase or decrease in the number of nouns), and the frequency of a noun like aspirin, for example, is simply a reflection of the headache rate of these speakers. Frequency studies of vocabulary are, consequently, not primarily language studies; they are investigations of human activities.Our conceptualization of the entire frequency problem is one thing if we ask "What is the frequency of 'vector' in the English language?" (a false linguistic frame of reference), and something quite different if we ask "What proportion of the total population, at what time intervals, has use for the word 'vector'?" Man if he talks at all, always talks about something specific and what word counters are trying 'to find out is what he talks about most, that is, how he distributes his time among all the possible things he might talk about.This leads us to the second fallacy. (II) If we are actually investigating, in frequency counts, the specific verbal activities of real people every utterance has space-time coordinates, that is, every speaker talks somewhere at some time. (Printed material is a fossil of this activity and becomes, as a result, ambiguous in space-time.) Now space and time, as elements of objective reality, determine human activity and, consequently, the frequency of word usage. The frequency potential of all words, then, depends upon the distribution of population in space and time. For example, the frequency of the word "rain" is undoubtedly much higher here in New England than in Southern California, first, because there are more people to use the word and, second, because it rains here more often. The total frequency of "rain" for these two regions represents neither area, no reality, and is obviously not a significant linguistic fact.There exists, if this principle is extended, no uniform vocabulary frequency potential for the language and an average is meaningless for any specific purpose.(III) There does not exist, nor can there be devised, a scientific method of sampling which will reveal anything reliable about word frequencies in a language as a whole. Actual speech (writing, etc.) has a linear structure. What I am saying now is coming at you word by word, serially, on a time line. A number of random segments of such linear speech cannot be welded together into a composite line which will represent any reality. A set of such examples is not even a satisfactory report on the specific material sampled. On an absurdly simple level, a linear weld of this kind produces something like the following three piece composite: "The special significance of vector analysis-in all Congregational Church socials-causes most hens to produce twice the normal number of eggs."The distribution of lexical items along this linear compound cannot possibly provide useful information about any extended segment of each compounding sample. Distribution and frequency have meaning only in terms of a homogeneous whole which is, theoretically, a non-existent entity in actual speech.(IV) The 80 per cent fallacy deserves special attention. It has been demonstrated by numerous word counts that a few hundred words make up some 80 per cent of all the running words found in the counts. It has been concluded, as a result, that you can say almost everything you want to say with a very small vocabulary. It has even been said that the average American uses only some 500 words per day. Both the facts and the conclusions drawn from these counts are non-scientific and relatively meaningless. Let us take a simple example. James Joyce's Ulysses has 260,430 running words. Approximately 1000 words make up 80 per cent of this total. There are, however, 29,899 different words in the novel. Consequently, while 1000 words take care of 80 per cent by volume of what Joyce wrote, they actually represent, if we assume that he intended every different word to be meaningful, only 3.3 per cent of what he said. The word counters have been, obviously, misled into the belief that quantity and quality are identical. By such logic we should have to contend that once we have bought the nails we practically own a house since, after all, there are more nails in a house than anything else.Preliminary conclusions relevant to MT: There exists no scientific method of establishing a limited vocabulary which will translate any predictable percentage of the content (not the volume) of heterogeneous material. An all-purpose mechanical memory will have to contain something approaching the total available vocabulary of both the foreign language and the target language. In order to cover most semantic variations several million of items would be needed. At the present time we have no machine which can manage such a number at a profitable speed.PART II: A statistical analysis of arbitrarily selected samples (segments) of various types of discourse does reveal a number of facts which are important to problems of mechanical translation.I should like now to show you a number of slides which represent the results of an analysis of 60 samples of about 500 words each taken from contemporary Spanish.(A) Internal ratios. Language as a structural system is statistically closed, that is, any finite sample will exhibit a ratio pattern of the various parts of speech. Some notion of the volume of each part of speech will be essential to the spatial arrangement of vocabulary items in a mechanical memory, that is, the contact rate of each part of speech will determine whether its vocabulary should be in the high or slow speed memory of any multiple speed machine.Slide 1: parts of speech in which form and function are identical; not all of total vocabulary covered. Observations: (a) ratios are not determined by content, that is, subject matter, but by types of discourse: dialogue, expository prose, narration, description, etc.(b) the frequency of specific items in any part of speech is strongly conditioned by the total ratio of the part of speech and the total available items of that part of speech in the lexicon of the language. Although nouns make up the largest percentage of items in most of the samples, the fact that some 200,000 are potentially available means that no single noun can build up a high frequency. This suggests that even when dealing with highly specialized topics that no predictable limit can be established for the content-bearing vocabulary simply because the low incidence of individual items would require an exhaustive search which is highly impractical.(c) three major patterns are to be observed: noun, definite article, and preposition behave alike. Pronouns, verbs, and adverbs are in reverse complementary distribution. The conjunctions, indefinite article, and adjectives are independent of the ratios of the contrasting constellations.Slide 2: all major parts of speech, items classified entirely by function. Conjunction is now only individualistic class. Two major constellations which reveal patterns determined by types of discourse.General conclusion: Treatment of vocabulary will probably be most satisfactory for mechanical translation if dealt with in terms of types of discourse.(B) Frequency ratios: The speed and efficiency of mechanical translation depends, vocabulary-wise, on the number of times specific lexical items are repeated in the text. To demonstrate the problem I shall show you three slides giving the ratio distribution of the noun, verb, and adjective (instances where form and function are identical) for the 60 samples. Observe the following points:(1) Words which appear twice or three times in the samples are relatively stable. The singlettes and high frequency words are in complementary distribution and make up the major portions of most of the samples.(2) Ratios are not identical for the different parts of speech.(3) Several factors appear to determine ratios: potential vocabulary of the writer (children's short stories), restricted topic of discourse (physics), type of discourse (dialogue, etc.).General observations:(1) The suggestion that words which appear only once may be ignored in MT does not appear profitable. The singlettes make up too large a portion of discourse.(2) Planned omissions should be analyzed in terms of the part of speech.(3) High frequency words are dominant and may be presumed to determine the main topic or theme of discourse. The low frequency words, in contrast, are most critical since they represent what the writer is saying about the core topic.(C) Frequency and distribution of the various parts of speech, by function. Preliminary observations:Aside from the general fact that all linguistic data plot out in the form of a parabolic curve, the various parts of speech behave statistically in quite different fashions:(1) the degree of incline of the parabolic curve is (except for proper names, formulae, etc.) in proportion to the number of lexical items available in the language, that is, the frequency and distribution reach 1 (or the lowest possible minimum) sooner, for example, in the case of adverbs than nouns since there are fewer of the former than the latter. Slides: Articles, Pronouns, Adverb 1, Verb 1, Adjective 1, Noun 1.By extending this principle to the problem of micro-vocabularies we may predict, with reasonable assurance, that there should be found in all highly technical and restricted fields a high frequency of a few words and an extremely large number of single words in typical samples. This explains, in part at least, why Oswald found that a relatively few nouns cover nearly 90 per cent of the vocabulary in brain surgery in German. Whenever the total available number of lexical items is small, repetition must increase or discourse cannot be sustained.The facts just demonstrated also provide a general answer to the question of the feasibility of micro-vocabularies and throw some light on the problem of not translating rare words. The less specialized the field, the larger the number of available words, the lower the frequency of the most common and, consequently, the greater the semantic importance of rare words. The present paper, for example, deals with a highly technical field in linguistics but draws upon such a wide and unpredictable vocabulary that no micro-vocabulary based on previous articles on word frequency would provide a satisfactory translation. I shall cite a few critical words (those that cannot be omitted without serious distortion of the sense) to demonstrate the point. Notice, also, that you cannot determine the topic of discourse from this list: coordinate, aspirin, technological, headache, rain, population, linear, weld, slide, church, machine, hen, constellation, singlette, egg, children, physics, core.A micro-vocabulary appears feasible only if one is dealing with a micro-subject, a field in which the number of objective entities and the number of possible actions are extremely limited. The number of such fields is, probably, insignificant.(2) The non-content-bearing parts of speech (articles, prepositions, conjunctions, adverb 2, relative, demonstrative, and indefinite pronouns) exhibit an extremely high degree of correlation between frequency and distribution. 3 slides: articles, pronouns, adverbs.Within the same part of speech the correlation between frequency and distribution increases as the referential value decreases. 2 slides: Adjective 1, Adjective 2, 3, etc. The possessive, demonstrative, pronoun adjectives show a much higher correlation than adjectives which refer to the nature of reality. These adjectives are, so to speak, indifferent to the subject of discourse while fat, lateral, huge, etc. are restricted to certain subjects.High correlation appears in other parts of speech only at the tail of the parabola where it is, for obvious reasons, insignificant, and at the head where it indicates that all high frequency words are non-specific, operational, and non-indicative of the subject of discourse. 2 slides: Noun 1, Verb 1. This principle may be expected to show some significant variations when applied to restricted fields, what I have called micro-subjects. In specific examples of discourse high frequency contentbearing words commonly outnumber the parallel high frequency words (of the same part of speech) in the general language. They define the main topic, for example, the way frequency, word, speech, distribution, noun, etc. define the subject of this paper, but, curiously enough, these words do not tell us what is being said about the topic. This fact establishes a principle which cannot be overstressed in dealing with vocabulary problems in mechanical translation, namely, that the rarer words carry the significant and critical message in most extended communications. The tail of the parabola is what makes one article on brain surgery different from another.(3) The middle range of the parabola for all content-bearing words exhibits a low correlation between frequency and distribution. The actual degree of divergence depends upon the general semantic function of the various parts of speech and their potential descriptive range or combinatory power. Modifiers have a wider distribution potential than head words, and verbs more than nouns. 4 slides: Noun 1, Adjective 1, Verb l, Adverb 1. This confirms a principle which has been much debated in structural linguistics, namely, that the noun is the core word in communication.We have now established a hierarchy of the parts of speech which should provide an operational principle in the preparation of vocabulary lists for a machine memory. The value of micro-vocabularies depends directly upon the function of the part of speech and the total number of available words. It may be predicted that as the degree of correlation between frequency and distribution increases the larger the percentage of the total available vocabulary for such parts of speech which will have to be included in any micro-vocabulary. Thus, to pick up Oswald's problem again, a micro-vocabulary for brain surgery will require less than 1 per cent of the available nouns in German but probably100 per cent of the secondary adverbs. If it seem valuable, further research could presumably define rather accurately the percentage of the total vocabulary for each part of speech normally required to carry on discourse in any well-defined field.Conclusion: The present data also points to another division of vocabulary which I should like to discuss in the way of conclusion. Vocabulary appears to fall into three major classes:(1) words which are primarily indifferent to the subject of discourse and which will be indispensable for any type of translation.(2) words which define the theme or topic of discourse and which cluster in somewhat predictable constellations and appear with especially high frequency within specialized fields.(3) words which provide the running commentaries upon the theme or topic of discourse and which appear with very low frequencies and do not tend to cluster. These words make up the tail of the parabola and are not amenable to precise prediction since they represent the potential associations which every speaker may establish between his topic and the infinite universe. They are the bridge between the closed system of structural vocabulary, the restricted vocabulary of the specialties, and the cosmic reality within which the language system and the speciality exist and operate. To presuppose that such a vocabulary can be defined and limited requires the assumption that knowledge has reached its maximum potential and that man will discover no new and hitherto unknown associations between departments of knowledge.The limitations of machine translation which we must face are, vocabulary-wise, the inadequacy of a closed and rigid system operating as the medium of translation within an everexpanding, open continuum.Special mention must be made of the contributions of Harry Huskey and Charles Africa to the preparation of this paper. Mr.Huskey has made many valuable suggestions and his staff has done the graphs and slides. Mr.Africa has done almost all of the actual counting and the preparation of the raw data. | null | null | null | null | Main paper:
:
PART I: Introduction: I assumed in preparing this report that this group would be more interested in conclusions and operational facts than in the procedures by which such information was obtained. To save valuable time for discussion, I shall make a few introductory and rather categorical statements especially pertinent to frequency problems in linguistics and to mechanical translation. If I sound dogmatic, the impression should be attributed to haste rather than intention.I shall begin by exposing four major fallacies which are current in most discussions of word frequencies:(I) The traditional vocabulary frequency studies, with which you are all familiar, are not primarily linguistic investigations. Neither the number of nouns in the Oxford Dictionary nor the frequency with which any English noun is used are basic linguistic facts. The total number of English nouns is a manifestation of the technological and cultural advancement of speakers of English (the language would be neither more English nor less English with an increase or decrease in the number of nouns), and the frequency of a noun like aspirin, for example, is simply a reflection of the headache rate of these speakers. Frequency studies of vocabulary are, consequently, not primarily language studies; they are investigations of human activities.Our conceptualization of the entire frequency problem is one thing if we ask "What is the frequency of 'vector' in the English language?" (a false linguistic frame of reference), and something quite different if we ask "What proportion of the total population, at what time intervals, has use for the word 'vector'?" Man if he talks at all, always talks about something specific and what word counters are trying 'to find out is what he talks about most, that is, how he distributes his time among all the possible things he might talk about.This leads us to the second fallacy. (II) If we are actually investigating, in frequency counts, the specific verbal activities of real people every utterance has space-time coordinates, that is, every speaker talks somewhere at some time. (Printed material is a fossil of this activity and becomes, as a result, ambiguous in space-time.) Now space and time, as elements of objective reality, determine human activity and, consequently, the frequency of word usage. The frequency potential of all words, then, depends upon the distribution of population in space and time. For example, the frequency of the word "rain" is undoubtedly much higher here in New England than in Southern California, first, because there are more people to use the word and, second, because it rains here more often. The total frequency of "rain" for these two regions represents neither area, no reality, and is obviously not a significant linguistic fact.There exists, if this principle is extended, no uniform vocabulary frequency potential for the language and an average is meaningless for any specific purpose.(III) There does not exist, nor can there be devised, a scientific method of sampling which will reveal anything reliable about word frequencies in a language as a whole. Actual speech (writing, etc.) has a linear structure. What I am saying now is coming at you word by word, serially, on a time line. A number of random segments of such linear speech cannot be welded together into a composite line which will represent any reality. A set of such examples is not even a satisfactory report on the specific material sampled. On an absurdly simple level, a linear weld of this kind produces something like the following three piece composite: "The special significance of vector analysis-in all Congregational Church socials-causes most hens to produce twice the normal number of eggs."The distribution of lexical items along this linear compound cannot possibly provide useful information about any extended segment of each compounding sample. Distribution and frequency have meaning only in terms of a homogeneous whole which is, theoretically, a non-existent entity in actual speech.(IV) The 80 per cent fallacy deserves special attention. It has been demonstrated by numerous word counts that a few hundred words make up some 80 per cent of all the running words found in the counts. It has been concluded, as a result, that you can say almost everything you want to say with a very small vocabulary. It has even been said that the average American uses only some 500 words per day. Both the facts and the conclusions drawn from these counts are non-scientific and relatively meaningless. Let us take a simple example. James Joyce's Ulysses has 260,430 running words. Approximately 1000 words make up 80 per cent of this total. There are, however, 29,899 different words in the novel. Consequently, while 1000 words take care of 80 per cent by volume of what Joyce wrote, they actually represent, if we assume that he intended every different word to be meaningful, only 3.3 per cent of what he said. The word counters have been, obviously, misled into the belief that quantity and quality are identical. By such logic we should have to contend that once we have bought the nails we practically own a house since, after all, there are more nails in a house than anything else.Preliminary conclusions relevant to MT: There exists no scientific method of establishing a limited vocabulary which will translate any predictable percentage of the content (not the volume) of heterogeneous material. An all-purpose mechanical memory will have to contain something approaching the total available vocabulary of both the foreign language and the target language. In order to cover most semantic variations several million of items would be needed. At the present time we have no machine which can manage such a number at a profitable speed.PART II: A statistical analysis of arbitrarily selected samples (segments) of various types of discourse does reveal a number of facts which are important to problems of mechanical translation.I should like now to show you a number of slides which represent the results of an analysis of 60 samples of about 500 words each taken from contemporary Spanish.(A) Internal ratios. Language as a structural system is statistically closed, that is, any finite sample will exhibit a ratio pattern of the various parts of speech. Some notion of the volume of each part of speech will be essential to the spatial arrangement of vocabulary items in a mechanical memory, that is, the contact rate of each part of speech will determine whether its vocabulary should be in the high or slow speed memory of any multiple speed machine.Slide 1: parts of speech in which form and function are identical; not all of total vocabulary covered. Observations: (a) ratios are not determined by content, that is, subject matter, but by types of discourse: dialogue, expository prose, narration, description, etc.(b) the frequency of specific items in any part of speech is strongly conditioned by the total ratio of the part of speech and the total available items of that part of speech in the lexicon of the language. Although nouns make up the largest percentage of items in most of the samples, the fact that some 200,000 are potentially available means that no single noun can build up a high frequency. This suggests that even when dealing with highly specialized topics that no predictable limit can be established for the content-bearing vocabulary simply because the low incidence of individual items would require an exhaustive search which is highly impractical.(c) three major patterns are to be observed: noun, definite article, and preposition behave alike. Pronouns, verbs, and adverbs are in reverse complementary distribution. The conjunctions, indefinite article, and adjectives are independent of the ratios of the contrasting constellations.Slide 2: all major parts of speech, items classified entirely by function. Conjunction is now only individualistic class. Two major constellations which reveal patterns determined by types of discourse.General conclusion: Treatment of vocabulary will probably be most satisfactory for mechanical translation if dealt with in terms of types of discourse.(B) Frequency ratios: The speed and efficiency of mechanical translation depends, vocabulary-wise, on the number of times specific lexical items are repeated in the text. To demonstrate the problem I shall show you three slides giving the ratio distribution of the noun, verb, and adjective (instances where form and function are identical) for the 60 samples. Observe the following points:(1) Words which appear twice or three times in the samples are relatively stable. The singlettes and high frequency words are in complementary distribution and make up the major portions of most of the samples.(2) Ratios are not identical for the different parts of speech.(3) Several factors appear to determine ratios: potential vocabulary of the writer (children's short stories), restricted topic of discourse (physics), type of discourse (dialogue, etc.).General observations:(1) The suggestion that words which appear only once may be ignored in MT does not appear profitable. The singlettes make up too large a portion of discourse.(2) Planned omissions should be analyzed in terms of the part of speech.(3) High frequency words are dominant and may be presumed to determine the main topic or theme of discourse. The low frequency words, in contrast, are most critical since they represent what the writer is saying about the core topic.(C) Frequency and distribution of the various parts of speech, by function. Preliminary observations:Aside from the general fact that all linguistic data plot out in the form of a parabolic curve, the various parts of speech behave statistically in quite different fashions:(1) the degree of incline of the parabolic curve is (except for proper names, formulae, etc.) in proportion to the number of lexical items available in the language, that is, the frequency and distribution reach 1 (or the lowest possible minimum) sooner, for example, in the case of adverbs than nouns since there are fewer of the former than the latter. Slides: Articles, Pronouns, Adverb 1, Verb 1, Adjective 1, Noun 1.By extending this principle to the problem of micro-vocabularies we may predict, with reasonable assurance, that there should be found in all highly technical and restricted fields a high frequency of a few words and an extremely large number of single words in typical samples. This explains, in part at least, why Oswald found that a relatively few nouns cover nearly 90 per cent of the vocabulary in brain surgery in German. Whenever the total available number of lexical items is small, repetition must increase or discourse cannot be sustained.The facts just demonstrated also provide a general answer to the question of the feasibility of micro-vocabularies and throw some light on the problem of not translating rare words. The less specialized the field, the larger the number of available words, the lower the frequency of the most common and, consequently, the greater the semantic importance of rare words. The present paper, for example, deals with a highly technical field in linguistics but draws upon such a wide and unpredictable vocabulary that no micro-vocabulary based on previous articles on word frequency would provide a satisfactory translation. I shall cite a few critical words (those that cannot be omitted without serious distortion of the sense) to demonstrate the point. Notice, also, that you cannot determine the topic of discourse from this list: coordinate, aspirin, technological, headache, rain, population, linear, weld, slide, church, machine, hen, constellation, singlette, egg, children, physics, core.A micro-vocabulary appears feasible only if one is dealing with a micro-subject, a field in which the number of objective entities and the number of possible actions are extremely limited. The number of such fields is, probably, insignificant.(2) The non-content-bearing parts of speech (articles, prepositions, conjunctions, adverb 2, relative, demonstrative, and indefinite pronouns) exhibit an extremely high degree of correlation between frequency and distribution. 3 slides: articles, pronouns, adverbs.Within the same part of speech the correlation between frequency and distribution increases as the referential value decreases. 2 slides: Adjective 1, Adjective 2, 3, etc. The possessive, demonstrative, pronoun adjectives show a much higher correlation than adjectives which refer to the nature of reality. These adjectives are, so to speak, indifferent to the subject of discourse while fat, lateral, huge, etc. are restricted to certain subjects.High correlation appears in other parts of speech only at the tail of the parabola where it is, for obvious reasons, insignificant, and at the head where it indicates that all high frequency words are non-specific, operational, and non-indicative of the subject of discourse. 2 slides: Noun 1, Verb 1. This principle may be expected to show some significant variations when applied to restricted fields, what I have called micro-subjects. In specific examples of discourse high frequency contentbearing words commonly outnumber the parallel high frequency words (of the same part of speech) in the general language. They define the main topic, for example, the way frequency, word, speech, distribution, noun, etc. define the subject of this paper, but, curiously enough, these words do not tell us what is being said about the topic. This fact establishes a principle which cannot be overstressed in dealing with vocabulary problems in mechanical translation, namely, that the rarer words carry the significant and critical message in most extended communications. The tail of the parabola is what makes one article on brain surgery different from another.(3) The middle range of the parabola for all content-bearing words exhibits a low correlation between frequency and distribution. The actual degree of divergence depends upon the general semantic function of the various parts of speech and their potential descriptive range or combinatory power. Modifiers have a wider distribution potential than head words, and verbs more than nouns. 4 slides: Noun 1, Adjective 1, Verb l, Adverb 1. This confirms a principle which has been much debated in structural linguistics, namely, that the noun is the core word in communication.We have now established a hierarchy of the parts of speech which should provide an operational principle in the preparation of vocabulary lists for a machine memory. The value of micro-vocabularies depends directly upon the function of the part of speech and the total number of available words. It may be predicted that as the degree of correlation between frequency and distribution increases the larger the percentage of the total available vocabulary for such parts of speech which will have to be included in any micro-vocabulary. Thus, to pick up Oswald's problem again, a micro-vocabulary for brain surgery will require less than 1 per cent of the available nouns in German but probably100 per cent of the secondary adverbs. If it seem valuable, further research could presumably define rather accurately the percentage of the total vocabulary for each part of speech normally required to carry on discourse in any well-defined field.Conclusion: The present data also points to another division of vocabulary which I should like to discuss in the way of conclusion. Vocabulary appears to fall into three major classes:(1) words which are primarily indifferent to the subject of discourse and which will be indispensable for any type of translation.(2) words which define the theme or topic of discourse and which cluster in somewhat predictable constellations and appear with especially high frequency within specialized fields.(3) words which provide the running commentaries upon the theme or topic of discourse and which appear with very low frequencies and do not tend to cluster. These words make up the tail of the parabola and are not amenable to precise prediction since they represent the potential associations which every speaker may establish between his topic and the infinite universe. They are the bridge between the closed system of structural vocabulary, the restricted vocabulary of the specialties, and the cosmic reality within which the language system and the speciality exist and operate. To presuppose that such a vocabulary can be defined and limited requires the assumption that knowledge has reached its maximum potential and that man will discover no new and hitherto unknown associations between departments of knowledge.The limitations of machine translation which we must face are, vocabulary-wise, the inadequacy of a closed and rigid system operating as the medium of translation within an everexpanding, open continuum.Special mention must be made of the contributions of Harry Huskey and Charles Africa to the preparation of this paper. Mr.Huskey has made many valuable suggestions and his staff has done the graphs and slides. Mr.Africa has done almost all of the actual counting and the preparation of the raw data.
Appendix:
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7e4ed27ac1f48d1493c0f3e39474767c9bb311d9 | 244077686 | null | The structure of the problem of mechanical translation | The problem of mechanical translation has three principal components: (i) the formulation of a set of specifications for the objective to be attained; (ii) the design of a translating machine; and (iii) theoretical translation problems. | {
"name": [
"Helmer, Olaf"
],
"affiliation": [
null
]
} | null | null | Proceedings of the Conference on Mechanical Translation | 1952-06-01 | 0 | 0 | null | null | null | null | null | Decisions under (i) will have to be made under consideration of the purpose to which the translation output will be put. The prime distinction here is as to whether the emphasis is placed on an accurate transmittal of the cognitive content of the input or rather on a faithful rendering of the style and emotional content. In the former case one may want to require a strict logical equivalence of input and output, or one may be satisfied with a certain (high) degree of message equivalence, in which case it would be desirable to have a criterion by which it is possible to decide which of two proposed translation schemes is to be considered preferable.As for (ii), it appears that highspeed general-purpose computing machines will be able to handle the main translation task. Engineering design therefore should concentrate on ancillary devices designed to reduce the input and output bottlenecks. In particular, an automatic reading machine would be necessary for fast mass translation. In addition, radical devices for reducing the input and output volume of the translation machine might be considered, such as automatic pre-or post-translation abstracting methods.The theoretical translation problems, (iii), divide themselves into syntactical and semantic ones. The former are concerned with word and sentence structure, the latter with the meanings of words and phrases. Both probably require separate translation procedures. Syntactical problems, in principle, can be handled by a logical analysis of the languages in question, while semantic problems lead into questions of word frequency, optimal dictionary size, and the dependence of ambiguity of meaning on the context. | Main paper:
:
Decisions under (i) will have to be made under consideration of the purpose to which the translation output will be put. The prime distinction here is as to whether the emphasis is placed on an accurate transmittal of the cognitive content of the input or rather on a faithful rendering of the style and emotional content. In the former case one may want to require a strict logical equivalence of input and output, or one may be satisfied with a certain (high) degree of message equivalence, in which case it would be desirable to have a criterion by which it is possible to decide which of two proposed translation schemes is to be considered preferable.As for (ii), it appears that highspeed general-purpose computing machines will be able to handle the main translation task. Engineering design therefore should concentrate on ancillary devices designed to reduce the input and output bottlenecks. In particular, an automatic reading machine would be necessary for fast mass translation. In addition, radical devices for reducing the input and output volume of the translation machine might be considered, such as automatic pre-or post-translation abstracting methods.The theoretical translation problems, (iii), divide themselves into syntactical and semantic ones. The former are concerned with word and sentence structure, the latter with the meanings of words and phrases. Both probably require separate translation procedures. Syntactical problems, in principle, can be handled by a logical analysis of the languages in question, while semantic problems lead into questions of word frequency, optimal dictionary size, and the dependence of ambiguity of meaning on the context.
Appendix:
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3a02ddf01c8742cca94e8470f135d35f56ae1941 | 244077675 | null | Word-by-word translation | When I learned that I had been summoned to address myself to the topic of word-by-word translation I felt like a geographer invited to discuss the utility of the conception that the world is flat. In short, I can only say that word-by-word translation is not possible, if we are to understand by the term a wordwise transverbalization from one language into another, particularly from German into English. It was, indeed, the discovery of the impossibility of wordwise translation that prompted the syntactical investigation outlined in Proposals for the Mechanical Resolution of German Syntax Patterns. The research of the summer of 1950 was begun by translating word by word into English various German texts in the field of mathematics. Our efforts rapidly came to grief, chiefly because of the lamentable fact that the German "articles" are also "words", but words of Protean transformations when carried over into English. Take the harmless-looking little form der. A word-by-word transverbalization into English would require, to be complete, a listing of the following possibilities: "the" (der Mann); "of the" (der Frau or der Frauen); "to the, for the" (also der Frau); "he" (der kommt nicht); "her, to her" (der geb' ich's nie); "who" (der Mann, der kommt ...); "whom" (die Frau, der ich es gab) -and diverse other other more subtle variants. The other forms of the "article" require almost all equally complex transverbalizations. When to circumstances such as these there is added the distressing oddity of German word order, word-by-word translation from German to English becomes either a jest or a horror. To be quite sure of the impossibility of wordwise translation, we concocted diverse multiple-choice translations -primitive ancestors of Mr. Bar-Hillel's appendix to "The Present State of Research on MT" -and these translations we submitted to our mathematical colleagues, who could make no sense out of the gibberish and were thereby confirmed in their conviction that people who dabbled with MT were crackpots. In the appendix you can consult one of the less horrific samples that I found in my files and see for yourselves how tedious it is even to try to make one's way through such a transverbalization maze. The happier results that can be obtained from block-by~block transverbalization, in which process problems of syntactic ambiguity are solved by the connection of each syntactic segment to the other, and the fluid German word order is resolved into a rigid English sequence, are, I take it, familiar to you from the Proposals. I think there can no longer be any doubt that the data of syntactical connection require us henceforth to think in terms not of word-by-word, but of block-byblock translation. At this point I think it will be in order to defend myself briefly from the charge of having failed to realize the importance of producing "one sequential system" of syntactical operations. Quite on the contrary, I have always been of the conviction that such a system is a sine-qua-non of MT. I fear that my critic has "mistook me all this while," and that he, as a theoretician, has misunderstood my pragmatism. The fact is that there can be only theoretical fascination, but no actua1 usefulness, in any complete system that is not devised for a specific mechanism and for a specific purpose. All sorts of complete sequential systems are possible, but we cannot determine which one will be most desirable for MT until we decide how MT is to be accomplished -what functions in the process are to be assigned to machines, what are to be left to human operators, and above all, in what fashion the vocabulary of the FL is to be transferred to the TL. There is no a priori "operational syntax." There are only operational syntaxes, whose elaboration will vary as the deviser's presuppositions and aims vary. Take Pollard's system, for instance, which I admire with more reserve than some do. It is "complete", | {
"name": [
"Oswald, Victor A."
],
"affiliation": [
null
]
} | null | null | Proceedings of the Conference on Mechanical Translation | 1952-06-01 | 0 | 3 | null | to be sure, but it presupposes a human translator with a grasp of what we vaguely call "the elements" of German, a translator who is, for instance, equipped to find his way among multiple choices of the sort I outlined above. Pollard's rule 1 is that when a noun (identifiable by capitalization) occurs on a "break" (comma, period, etc.) it is possible to translate word-by-word from the beginning of the sentence to the break in question. It is possible, that is, if the translator can recognize the patterns of syntactic connection and knows, or can establish, the significance of the meaning-bearing words -a task which, unfortunately, our poor machines, without benefit of "elements," are incapable of performing. All that the Proposals intended to demonstrate was that machines can be instructed to recognize syntactic connection. Any complete system will have to be devised to meet the operations of some specific machine or of some specific combination of man and machine.Meanwhile, we must investigate the other sine-qua-non for block-by-block translation: the problem of the interpretation of the meaning-bearing words. Syntactic connection will almost infallibly identify word-function, and we now know that a recognition of syntactic connection can be built into the "memory" of machines of the high speed computer type. Word-meaning, on the other hand, is not a factor capable of being solved mechanically except by an elaborate reduction of the possibilities of multiple significance: that is by the production of a large -possibly very large -number of glossaries that pertain to one radically limited field of discourse.I do not think we should discard the possibility of a mechanical solution of the problem of multiple meaning until we have explored it more carefully than has hitherto been proposed. I greatly admire Mr. Reifler's conception of an FL pre-editor -as, indeed, I admire all of his ingenious proposals. But I do not believe that his combination of pre-editor with a mechanical dictionary constitutes the ultimate solution of our problem. In fact, I am of the opinion that we must grapple with the problem precisely at the point where Mr. Reifler abandons it. His proposals are most enlightening for the solution of problems of general language, but he has excluded problems of specific language (the jargons of medicine, mathematics, linguistics, geology etc.) from the domain of mechanical solution. We shall be much closer to the realization of mechanical translation, if we can mechanize the components of his "mechanized" dictionary.Mr. Bull's counts of function frequency and distribution, the purpose of which we have apparently failed to make completely clear, have produced fascinating results on which he will himself report. For my purpose it is enough to point out that he has demonstrated empirically something we have hitherto had to assume on the basis of impressionistic observation: the only meaning-bearing forms that we can purposefully isolate are nouns, verbs, adjectives, and -probably -adverbs. All the other "words" when transverbalized from one language into another are susceptible of such diverse interpretation that they must either, like the German article, be treated primarily as elements of syntactic connection, or else, like prepositions, be transverbalized in a multiplicity of meanings from among which an editor is expected to make his choice.I shall have something to say later about the microsemantics of nouns, the only set of the meaning-bearing group I have studied. For the moment, let us take a generalized view of the problem. The point must be made that no system as yet proposed will solve the problem of multiple significance. A pre-editor can do much to simplify syntactic connection for mechanical "digestion," but I do not see how, as an operator in the FL, he can effectively guide either the machine or the machine and a posteditor through the mazes of multiple meaning in the TL. Nor do I think we can hope for much accurate help from one monolingual post-editor or even from one bilingual consultant. What has been overlooked is the fact that the competence required in the post-editor, even if he be bilingual, is only partially linguistic. The real prerequisite for him is an intimate knowledge of the field to which the translated text pertains.Let us take the case of a hypothetical bilingual post-editor. He may have a perfect competence in translating literary German into English: he may have a working knowledge of geology, let us say, or of chemistry, or of anatomy, or of zoology, or-in an exceptional case -of all of these fields; but unless he knows mathematics well he is never going to decide that Menge in certain contexts must be translated "set" and not "quantity" or "multitude" or "mass" or "crowd" or anything of the like. I am afraid that the appendix to "The Present State of Research in MT" is apt to be misleading. Although the text is apparently specific, it is actually in the nature of a passage from "General Science". Given the one key word "microscope," the remainder of the words fall rather readily into relationship to it. Fortunately almost any educated editor would be expected to know what a microscope is and what sort of functions are expected of it. On the other hand if the key-word were the name of some less generally familiar device -let us say an oscilloscope or a kymograph (as used in phonetics laboratories), only an editor familiar with the gadget and its uses could surmise what functions it might be expected to perform. Some of us have seen bilingual experts trying to make just the sort of interpretation proposed for a bilingual editor: professors of German deciphering the efforts made by graduate students to translate material in their field for the purpose of passing a language-proficiency requirement. The results are all-too-often simply ludicrous. One of my colleagues almost flunked a mathematics student for translating Eigenwerte by the apparently preposterous form "eigenvalues", though this is, nevertheless, the proper English equivalent of the German original in a mathematical context. The fact that the bilingual professor spoke German like a native and knew zoology quite as well as he knew Goethe contributed, you see, nothing to his interpretation of this particular translated text.In short, no one post-editor, not even a bilingual, -unless he were a marvel of universal knowledge, in which case he would probably have something better to do than tinker with other people's texts -would be capable of solving the problem of multiple significance in the TL. A monolingual specialist in the particular field would unquestionably do far better. But in that case our process of MT would require a whole battery of monolingual experts, each of whom, if he would work on MT at all, would have to be taught the techniques appropriate to our operation, and each of whom would be susceptible to all the ills that flesh is heir to: human fallibility, death, illness, vacations, and better offers.Before we surrender our mechanistic autonomy, I suggest that we thoroughly explore the possibility of substituting for specialists, mechanized special micro-glossaries -glossaries which will reduce the range of choice of meaning from a bewildering multiplicity to a matter of -at the mosttwo or three. In fact, if the field be radically limited, we can probably produce bilingual glossaries with a preponderance of one-to-one equivalents.To resume my points in brief: word-by-word translation is literally impossible: the smallest unit with which we can operate is the syntactic block; the blocks can certainly be manipulated, either by mechanical operation alone or by a combination of pre-editing with mechanical operation, in such a way as to resolve patterns of syntactic connection and of word order from the FL into the TL; identification of meaning in the TL cannot be facilitated efficiently by a pre-editor; a monolingualor even bilingual -post-editor could be useful for producing a smoothly flowing text in the TL (e.g., solving the special problems of idioms, making satisfactory choice of significances for prepositions and conjunctions), but he cannot be expected to make choice among multiple significances for meaning-bearing forms in specialized contexts; therefore indispensable would be either a battery of post-editors with an intimate knowledge of diverse fields of specialization, or a body of separate mechanical micro-glossaries.One of our immediate problems is to determine whether we actually have a choice between specialist post-editors and micro-glossaries; that is, whether micro-glossaries can be devised. Thereafter we should have to determine which choice would provide greater efficiency. | null | null | null | null | Main paper:
:
to be sure, but it presupposes a human translator with a grasp of what we vaguely call "the elements" of German, a translator who is, for instance, equipped to find his way among multiple choices of the sort I outlined above. Pollard's rule 1 is that when a noun (identifiable by capitalization) occurs on a "break" (comma, period, etc.) it is possible to translate word-by-word from the beginning of the sentence to the break in question. It is possible, that is, if the translator can recognize the patterns of syntactic connection and knows, or can establish, the significance of the meaning-bearing words -a task which, unfortunately, our poor machines, without benefit of "elements," are incapable of performing. All that the Proposals intended to demonstrate was that machines can be instructed to recognize syntactic connection. Any complete system will have to be devised to meet the operations of some specific machine or of some specific combination of man and machine.Meanwhile, we must investigate the other sine-qua-non for block-by-block translation: the problem of the interpretation of the meaning-bearing words. Syntactic connection will almost infallibly identify word-function, and we now know that a recognition of syntactic connection can be built into the "memory" of machines of the high speed computer type. Word-meaning, on the other hand, is not a factor capable of being solved mechanically except by an elaborate reduction of the possibilities of multiple significance: that is by the production of a large -possibly very large -number of glossaries that pertain to one radically limited field of discourse.I do not think we should discard the possibility of a mechanical solution of the problem of multiple meaning until we have explored it more carefully than has hitherto been proposed. I greatly admire Mr. Reifler's conception of an FL pre-editor -as, indeed, I admire all of his ingenious proposals. But I do not believe that his combination of pre-editor with a mechanical dictionary constitutes the ultimate solution of our problem. In fact, I am of the opinion that we must grapple with the problem precisely at the point where Mr. Reifler abandons it. His proposals are most enlightening for the solution of problems of general language, but he has excluded problems of specific language (the jargons of medicine, mathematics, linguistics, geology etc.) from the domain of mechanical solution. We shall be much closer to the realization of mechanical translation, if we can mechanize the components of his "mechanized" dictionary.Mr. Bull's counts of function frequency and distribution, the purpose of which we have apparently failed to make completely clear, have produced fascinating results on which he will himself report. For my purpose it is enough to point out that he has demonstrated empirically something we have hitherto had to assume on the basis of impressionistic observation: the only meaning-bearing forms that we can purposefully isolate are nouns, verbs, adjectives, and -probably -adverbs. All the other "words" when transverbalized from one language into another are susceptible of such diverse interpretation that they must either, like the German article, be treated primarily as elements of syntactic connection, or else, like prepositions, be transverbalized in a multiplicity of meanings from among which an editor is expected to make his choice.I shall have something to say later about the microsemantics of nouns, the only set of the meaning-bearing group I have studied. For the moment, let us take a generalized view of the problem. The point must be made that no system as yet proposed will solve the problem of multiple significance. A pre-editor can do much to simplify syntactic connection for mechanical "digestion," but I do not see how, as an operator in the FL, he can effectively guide either the machine or the machine and a posteditor through the mazes of multiple meaning in the TL. Nor do I think we can hope for much accurate help from one monolingual post-editor or even from one bilingual consultant. What has been overlooked is the fact that the competence required in the post-editor, even if he be bilingual, is only partially linguistic. The real prerequisite for him is an intimate knowledge of the field to which the translated text pertains.Let us take the case of a hypothetical bilingual post-editor. He may have a perfect competence in translating literary German into English: he may have a working knowledge of geology, let us say, or of chemistry, or of anatomy, or of zoology, or-in an exceptional case -of all of these fields; but unless he knows mathematics well he is never going to decide that Menge in certain contexts must be translated "set" and not "quantity" or "multitude" or "mass" or "crowd" or anything of the like. I am afraid that the appendix to "The Present State of Research in MT" is apt to be misleading. Although the text is apparently specific, it is actually in the nature of a passage from "General Science". Given the one key word "microscope," the remainder of the words fall rather readily into relationship to it. Fortunately almost any educated editor would be expected to know what a microscope is and what sort of functions are expected of it. On the other hand if the key-word were the name of some less generally familiar device -let us say an oscilloscope or a kymograph (as used in phonetics laboratories), only an editor familiar with the gadget and its uses could surmise what functions it might be expected to perform. Some of us have seen bilingual experts trying to make just the sort of interpretation proposed for a bilingual editor: professors of German deciphering the efforts made by graduate students to translate material in their field for the purpose of passing a language-proficiency requirement. The results are all-too-often simply ludicrous. One of my colleagues almost flunked a mathematics student for translating Eigenwerte by the apparently preposterous form "eigenvalues", though this is, nevertheless, the proper English equivalent of the German original in a mathematical context. The fact that the bilingual professor spoke German like a native and knew zoology quite as well as he knew Goethe contributed, you see, nothing to his interpretation of this particular translated text.In short, no one post-editor, not even a bilingual, -unless he were a marvel of universal knowledge, in which case he would probably have something better to do than tinker with other people's texts -would be capable of solving the problem of multiple significance in the TL. A monolingual specialist in the particular field would unquestionably do far better. But in that case our process of MT would require a whole battery of monolingual experts, each of whom, if he would work on MT at all, would have to be taught the techniques appropriate to our operation, and each of whom would be susceptible to all the ills that flesh is heir to: human fallibility, death, illness, vacations, and better offers.Before we surrender our mechanistic autonomy, I suggest that we thoroughly explore the possibility of substituting for specialists, mechanized special micro-glossaries -glossaries which will reduce the range of choice of meaning from a bewildering multiplicity to a matter of -at the mosttwo or three. In fact, if the field be radically limited, we can probably produce bilingual glossaries with a preponderance of one-to-one equivalents.To resume my points in brief: word-by-word translation is literally impossible: the smallest unit with which we can operate is the syntactic block; the blocks can certainly be manipulated, either by mechanical operation alone or by a combination of pre-editing with mechanical operation, in such a way as to resolve patterns of syntactic connection and of word order from the FL into the TL; identification of meaning in the TL cannot be facilitated efficiently by a pre-editor; a monolingualor even bilingual -post-editor could be useful for producing a smoothly flowing text in the TL (e.g., solving the special problems of idioms, making satisfactory choice of significances for prepositions and conjunctions), but he cannot be expected to make choice among multiple significances for meaning-bearing forms in specialized contexts; therefore indispensable would be either a battery of post-editors with an intimate knowledge of diverse fields of specialization, or a body of separate mechanical micro-glossaries.One of our immediate problems is to determine whether we actually have a choice between specialist post-editors and micro-glossaries; that is, whether micro-glossaries can be devised. Thereafter we should have to determine which choice would provide greater efficiency.
Appendix:
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3c0dd4b5f42e88d1317475b575df699d95023edd | 27957304 | null | The conference on mechanical translation held at {M}.{I}.{T}., {J}une 17-20, 1952 | The following report was prepared immediately after the writer's return from the conference. It was written from the viewpoint of an engineer listening to experts in a field far separated from his own. Such judgments as may be found interspersed amongst the reports of individual papers are of an engineering nature, and are not to be construed, as being based upon other than an amateur's knowledge of linguistic theory. Further, they represent only the reporter's evaluation, not necessarily that of his company as a whole. It is of interest, however, that the writer's company, The International Business Machines Corporation, has jointly sponsored with Georgetown University a successful demonstration of syntactically correct mechanical translation from Russian into English. The computer employed was the IBM 701, and the programming techniques used were first discussed at the 1952 conference. | {
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]
} | null | null | Proceedings of the Conference on Mechanical Translation | 1952-06-01 | 0 | 7 | null | The concept of mechanical translation originated in two areas, the first being cryptographic work conducted by various governments during the late war, and the second being the successful inauguration and employment of the simultaneous translation schemes presently employed by the UN and other internation conferences. Broken down into basic essentials, translation consists of memory scanning for identification of meaning in two different symbolic systems, called languages, and simultaneous editing by the translator to convert the syntactical relationships of the language being translated to those of the translated language. Of these, the memory scanning is definitely paralleled in computer techniques. If one to one correlations in meaning existed between words of different languages, programming on existing computers would be completely successful. Syntactical relationships and shading of meaning by the context of the words makes the problem of mechanization exceedingly difficult in the absence of a mechanical means of converting from one syntax to another.Much work was stimulated by a memorandum, Translation, written by Dr. Warren Weaver of the Rockefeller Foundation.which was distributed to a selected group of linguists, psychologists, computer engineers, and philosophers. Dr. Yehoshua Bar-Hillel, acting under a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation and then con-* For a linguist's view of the same Conference, see MT, Vol. I, No. 2 , "Report on the First Conference on Mechanical Translation," Erwin Reifler, pp. 23-32. A list of participants in the Conference appears on p. 24 of that article. ducting his research at M.I.T., acted as the coordinator of the groups actively interested in mechanical translations. As part of his work, Dr. Bar-Hillel prepared a summary entitled "Present Interest in Mechanical Translation," listing the individuals actively working on the application of computers and computer techniques to mechanical translation. In 1952 he organized a Conference on Mechanical Translation at M.I.T.This report is concerned with providing a precis of the papers and discussions at the Conference.The Public Session of the Conference on Mechanical Translation was announced by invitations extended by Dr. Yehoshua Bar-Hillel to persons who might be interested in the problems of mechanical translation and, in particular to members of the Conference on Speech Communication which immediately preceded the Conference on Mechanical Translation. At the public session papers were not presented, but short talks were given by each of the five participants outlining their work in the field and their tentative proposals for future work.Dr. Bar-Hillel discussed the need and possibilities for mechanical translation, the need primarily arising in the fields of science and of diplomacy, for analysis of popular periodicals of various countries. Although a person may be versed in the cultural or popular language of several countries, this does not necessarily mean that the same individual is capable of translating scientific treatises originating in the same countries. This is due to the well known fact that each scientific discipline creates its own jargon, assigning very specific meanings to common words of the language, these meanings being peculiar to the particular science itself. There is, therefore, a need for translators who are capable of making meaningful interpretations, not only in the more popular writings, but also in specific areas of scientific research. The volume of material appearing in popular periodicals is appalling in its magnitude and complete scanning of a particular nation's output is virtually impossible as long as human translators must be relied upon. He concluded that it is in these areas that mechanical translation is capable of making a major contribution to society.Prof. Leon Dostert, Director of the Institute of Languages and Linguistics, Georgetown University, Washington, D. C., spoke on the subject of human translation versus machine translation. Prof. Dostert drew on his experience in setting up the translation system employed at the Nuremburg trials in Germany and in working with IBM in the development of the simultaneous translation system used at the UN and other international conferences. In discussing this problem, he made the statement that, except in the very specialized areas discussed by Dr. Bar-Hillel, there is no shortage of human translators, owing apparently to the fact that the current workload is regulated by their availability. The contribution a machine can make is in the processing of the vast amount of material that is currently not even being touched in the specialized fields. He described systems employed in setting up efficient simultaneous translation systems and also rapid printed translations in international gatherings. These systems were remarkably similar in their organization to machine organization for computer application. He confessed that he came to the Conference as a sceptic. (Later in the Conference he became convinced that mechanical translation would be possible.)Dr. Olaf Helmer, Director of Research, Mathematical Division, Rand Corporation, Santa Monica, California, discussed the structure of the problem of mechanical translation. Meanings of particular words and phrases may be idiomatic or may be changed or modified by the context in which they appear. Further, each group of languages has its own syntactical relationships which are peculiar to the group,and most frequently also vary in minor details among members of the same group. The machine must be capable of resolving idiomatic, contextual, and syntactic ambiguities if human editing is to be kept at a minimum and maximum intelligibility is to be achieved. Dr. Helmer discussed schemes that have been tentatively investigated by the Rand Corporation for solving this problem. His conclusion is that high speed general purpose computing machines will be able to handle the main translation task.Dr. Andrew D. Booth, Director, The Electronic Computer Section, Birkbeck College, University of London, discussed the popular misconceptions covered by the question, "How intelligent can a machine translator be ?" The conclusions necessarily were that "intelligence" as applied to machines involves a complete misunderstanding both of intelligence and of machines. No intelligence is required, on the part of the machine at least, in mechanical translation.Dr. James W. Perry, Center of International Studies, M.I.T., discussed machine techniques and index searching and translation. The basis of Dr. Perry's talk was the index searching machine developed by IBM to solve the problem of scanning vast amounts of information and extracting certain specific items. He discussed the development of coding on punched cards in order to employ a machine at maximum efficiency. He concluded on the basis of his acquaintanceship with existing machines and machine techniques that mechanical translation was not only feasible but far closer to realizations than possibly the audience recognized.A period of discussion from the floor followed the presentation of the talks. There was general agreement on the part of both the panel and the audience that mechanical translation was feasible. It was interesting to note that the computer engineers present presented all of the difficulties standing in the way of producing a mechanical translator from the engineering standpoint; the linguist, from his standpoint; and the psychologists and philosophers from the standpoint of their respective disciplines. Each agreed, however, that, if the other two groups did their work, we could in the near future produce adequate and intelligible machine programmed translations. Washington, presented the first two papers of the morning session entitled, "Mechanical Translation with Pre-editing,"and "Writing for Mechanical Translation."The first paper concerned itself with the fact that syntactical relationships differ amongst languages. For ease in programming on a mechanical translator, a source language should be arranged according to the syntax of the target language (language into which the material is being translated). Where this is not possible due to the fact that the syntax is inseparable from the actual word form (such as the dative case in Latin) certain keys, such as capital letters or diacritical marks, can be inserted as recognizable signals for a machine whose input is a print scanning device. Pre-editing then would imply the use of a human editor to rearrange the source language insofar as possible in accordance with the syntax of the target language, and secondly, employment of various inserted signals to notify the machine of syntactical arrangements inseparable from the word form.The second paper, on "Writing for Mechanical Translation," would necessitate the training of all writers, and more particularly their secretaries,in the required conventions for arrangement of an article for translation into a given language. The discussion of these two papers indicated that the use of a pre-editor, rather than educating all authors and all secretaries in techniques of writing for mechanical translations, is far preferable. As a matter of fact, a person skilled in keyboard operation could be readily trained to insert syntactical recognition signals at the time of keying the text into the machine. This, of course, also holds for the preparation of a manuscript for machine scanning.Dr. Yehoshua Bar-Hillel presented a paper on Mechanical Translation employing a post-editor. Since a one-to-one correlation does not exist between meanings of words expressing essentially the same idea in various languages, if a machine operates on a comparison basis only, or even if it is capable of computing syntactical relationship, a multiplicity of words in the target language can be derived for any single word of the source language. For a particular sentence, say of 10 words length, this can easily result in possible combinations of words in the target language extending to several thousands of more or less meaningful combinations. It is necessary, therefore, to incorporate some form of post-editing in order to resolve the ambiguities inherent in this relationship between languages. Dr. Bar-Hillel is much concerned with the tremendously increased demands in terms of machine storage capacity which this situation implies. It is, however, not quite so grave as appears on the surface, since particularly in scientific writings, a vast number of one-to-one correlations do exist.(The subject of glossaries to handle the scientific translations was covered in a later session of the conference.)The fourth paper, "Model English for Mechanical Translation" was presented by Prof. Stuart C. Dodd, Director, Washington Public Opinion Laboratory, University of Washington, Seattle. Dr. Dodd's paper concerned itself with the standardization of English syntax as a means of simplifying the use of English either as a source language or as a target language. A model language, as defined by Dr. Dodd, means any language in which the rules of syntax have been regularized, and in which familiarity of words is a governing criterion. The specific rules used in regularizing a language are itemized in the paper. The examples employed by Dr. Dodd indicate that regularizing, that is, constructing a model language, impaires but very slightly the readability and understandability of the subject matter. In English, at least, regularizing leads only to a certain quaintness of expression somewhat similar to the sentence structure employed by the Quakers.No attempts have been made as yet to regularize languages other than English, but at least for the Romance languages it seems on first view that such regularization can be accomplished.The particular rules of importance to Mechanical Translation are: one word order; one meaning for each word; and one form for each word.The experience gained in using model language at the Washington Public Opinion Laboratory indicates clearly that regularization of a language minimizes the points brought out by Dr. Bar-Hillel. The discussion showed that the conference was in substantial agreement that regularization by use of the concepts of a model language is feasible and directly applicable to the problems of mechanical translation. In particular, so far as the machines to be employed are concerned, the machine men present felt that it could be a decided advantage in reducing the complexity of equipment required.Chairman -A. C. Reynolds, Jr.Prof. Victor A. Oswald, Department of Germanic Languages, University of California, Los Angeles, presented the first paper entitled "Word-by-Word Translation." Prof. Oswald and Dr. Harry D. Huskey, Assistant Director, National Bureau of Standards Institute for Numerical Analysis, University of California, Los Angeles, jointly conducted experiments in the translation of a text in mathematics and another in brain surgery from German into English. The investigation by Dr. Oswald indicated that wordby-word translation from German into English was a virtually impossible task, chiefly because of the fact that German "articles" are also "words." Also, German sentence structure is such that word-by-word translation from German into English becomes virtually meaningless. Initial investigation resulted in a published report entitled, "Proposals for the Mechanical Resolution of German Syntax Patterns."Although word-by-word translation seemed impossible, breaking of the German sentence into a block-by-block formation, in which each block has a certain specific syntactical function, was far more profitable. Regularization of the German language and other languages of similar structure thus appears to be dependent upon such block-by-block analysis. The "Proposals" indicate that machines can be instructed to recognize syntactic connection upon this basis. The second major consideration for block-byblock translation is the problem of recognizing and interpreting the meaning-bearing words within a block. Syntactic connections will almost infallibly identify the word function and hence function recognition can be programmed. Linguistic research, particularly that conducted by Prof. William E. Bull, Department of Spanish, University of California, Los Angeles, (also a participant at the conference) shows clearly that the only meaning-bearing forms that can be isolated are nouns, verbs, adjectives, and possibly adverbs. In general, of these classes, nouns are by far the most useful and used bearers of meaning. No system yet proposed will solve the problem of multiple significance of the meaningbearing words. However, within a specific subject, a meaning-bearing word in general has only one specific meaning. This fact can be utilized to advantage in mechanical translation in which the criterion of meaning is determined by the subject matter being considered. Dr.Oswald proposed to take advantage of this fact by the use of what he termed micro-glossaries. These micro-glossaries would be constructed on the basis of the words most commonly used in specific subjects of interest; one such glossary being constructed for each subject to be translated. Mechanically, this means that two memories would be employed in a machine; one, a most used general vocabulary for the languages being processed; and two, a specific micro-glossary to assign specific meanings to words that would otherwise have a multiplicity of meaning; that is, if all their fields of usage were to be considered simultaneously. The concept of a micro-glossary and the use of blockby-block syntactic recognition in the machine met with favor from all the participants in the conference. The linguists appeared certain that block-by-block syntactic analysis of sentences could be accomplished and likewise were in agreement as to the reduction of ambiguity in the meaning of a word when only one field of interest was to be considered. The engineers present fully recognized the advantage to be gained from the reduction in size of memories growing out of the micro-glossary concept.Dr. Yehoshua Bar-Hillel presented the next paper on "Operational Syntax." No proposal had yet been presented to the conference regarding a means of programming a machine for recognizing syntactic connections. Dr. Bar-Hillel, examining this problem as a problem in symbolic logic, has discovered certain relationships that exist within the syntax of sentence structure. Further, he has discovered that these can be quite readily symbolized in the form of symbolic fractions. A simple multiplication of the fractions, which results in the cancellation of like quantities in the numerator and denominator, results in a unique symbol indicative of the functions of the word block so analyzed. Use of this analysis permits ready recognition of word blocks functioning as nouns, verbs, adjectives, or adverbs.The identification results in the ability to rearrange the syntax of the source language into the syntax of the target language. This is a simple arithmetic operation that can be readily programmed on a machine. The investigations to date have been preliminary, but indicate that the field is limited only by the number of languages which it would be profitable to so analyze.This was a completely new concept to the linguists of the conference who had intuitively felt that such a structure did exist but without the tools of symbolic logic had been unable to isolate the essential features that lead to the exceedingly simply arithmetic operations. The engineers immediately recognized the extreme advantages and the simplicity of the computing loops necessary to give the machine the ability to recognize word block functions and programmed reorganization of sentence structure.Prof. William N. Locke, Department of Modern Languages, M.I.T., presented the third paper on "Mechanical Translation of Printed and Spoken Material." This paper was presented orally only, no copies having been made for distribution.Prof. Locke is interested in the potentiality of using voice input to produce either a voice output or a printed output. He drew on work that has been conducted at the Bell Laboratories, at the Haskins Laboratories, at M.I.T., and elsewhere on the analysis of speech and the recognition of the components that form the spoken word. It appears at the present time that 8 such components uniquely determined a sound. Recognition of these 8 elements leads to the identification of one sound to the exclusion of all other sounds. It was Prof. Locke's contention that a machine could be built to recognize these 8 components and give a unique output (phoneme). The phoneme so constructed could be used with other phonemes to locate a specific unit within the memory whose meaning in the target language would be the same as the meaning in the source language. This of course pre-supposes the utilization of the philosophy in constructing memories as outlined in the previous pages of the conference.The discussion of Prof. Locke's paper was completely speculative since devices capable of so analyzing sounds are not yet in existence and it appears that it will be sometime in the future before such an art can become a science.Dr. Victor A. Oswald presented the first paper, entitled "Microsemantics." This paper continued the analysis that Dr. Oswald had presented on the preceding day in his discussion of word-by-word translation. He was now concerned with the fact that, in general, editing of the subject material would be required both before translation, in the source language, and after translation, in the target language. The problem is to simplify as much as possible the work required in such pre-editing and postediting.Assuming that syntactic considerations could be solved by such an analysis as that proposed by Dr. Bar-Hillel, the work of translation would be very greatly facilitated by the use of specialized glossaries concerned with the specific subject matter of the material being translated. (Dr. Oswald terms this type of glossary a micro-glossary, and the analysis that leads to it, microsemantical investigation.)The data obtained from every sort of linguistic frequency count when arranged according to descending numbers forms a monotonic descending curve. The words of highest frequency drop quite abruptly; words of medium frequency start flattening out; and words of highly specialized meaning that are used but seldom cause the curve to approach the horizontal axis asymptotically. The upper segment of the curve contains the words which are usually found in the normal or everyday vocabulary of a language, and contains about 80 per cent of the actual volume of the material. Unfortunately, these terms consist mainly of articles which convey but little meaning; the meaning-bearing forms, and in particular the nouns, are represented by the tail of the curve. All languages exhibit this characteristic curve. Thus, in order to find those words conveying the major meaning in any text, we are concerned with the tail of the curve rather than the large grouping of words occurring at the beginning of the curve. Considering that this particular section of the curve is representative of a micro-glossary of a specific subject in the language, the words of this section in general will have one and only one meaning.To verify this assumption, Dr. Oswald analyzed nearly a hundred papers in German on the subject of brain surgery. Technical nouns were abstracted from the first article. Additional nouns were added from the second article, and so through the complete series of texts employed. Each succeeding text was chosen from a different field of brain surgery. The amazing fact developed that after the fourth article, the glossary derived covered an average of 80 per cent of all the technical nouns in each succeeding article. From this, he constructed a microglossary that he considers representative of the field of brain surgery in the German language.A similar glossary of non-technical nouns was also compiled from the same series of articles. The frequency curve of the non-technical nouns was the same as that of the technical nouns. In other words, the brain surgeons are not only compelled to choose their technical nouns from a limited vocabulary, but their pattern of communication is so limited by practice and convention that even the range of non-technical nouns is predictable.We may generalize, although perhaps dangerously, that the same phenomenon will appear in all technical fields of a restricted nature.The micro-glossary was employed in programming translations on the SWAC in cooperation with Dr. Harry D. Huskey, Assistant Director, National Bureau of Standards Institute for Numerical Analysis, University of California, Los Angeles. The translations so obtained conveyed the meaning of the original article with correlations of meaning better than 90 per cent, on the assumption that the problems of syntax and contextual modification had previously been solved. Even without this assumption, the translated articles, when presented to a specialist in the field, in the raw un-edited form, conveyed the major portion of the meaning of the original article in the original language.The discussion that followed the paper clearly showed that the linguists working in other languages than German were in complete agreement as to the ease with which such microglossaries could be constructed. The engineers and scientists, from their knowledge of technical articles in their respective fields, indicated that the size of micro-glossaries in these fields would be as small in comparison to the complete vocabulary of a language as Dr. Oswald postulated. All agreed that the use of such micro-glossaries would enormously reduce the amount of memory required in a translating machine.In particular, the discussion centered on isolation of nouns as the major meaning-bearing words of a language. A rough analysis was made of the language being used around the table, and it was quite evident that in general verbs employed in conveying meaning through speech are in the present tense and in the vast majority of cases the verb is a form of the verb "to be." Since information is adequately conveyed by speech, it seemed reasonable to the participants that a translation which would ignore tenses and concentrate on nouns whichin newspaper parlance -convey the who, what, when, where, and how, of a statement, would adequately convey to a post-editor the necessary raw material to be employed in producing a polished translation. Dr. Oswald was congratulated by the group for his work and analysis of this phenomena.Prof. William E. Bull, Department of Spanish, University of California, Los Angeles, presented the second paper entitled "Frequency Problems in Mechanical Translation." Prof. Bull's investigation in Spanish literature paralleled the investigations of Dr. Oswald. Running texts in Spanish literature, which employed a general vocabulary rather than a restricted vocabulary, verify in detail the existence of the same phenomenon in general language as occurred in the restricted field of brain surgery, but Prof. Bull stressed that low frequency, unpredictable terms often carry critically important meaning.Prof. Bull exhibited numerous slides showing the frequency counts of words, the frequency occurrence of particular parts of speech, and the frequency counts of words within the classification of a particular part of speech. He discussed in some detail the problem of determining syntactic connections in Spanish sentences. He also discussed the type of work and the type of personnel required to extend knowledge in this field not only for Spanish but also for other languages of interest.Prof. Bull's paper was in part abstracted from a monograph not yet published. Therefore, he did not present a written paper to the participants of the conference, and this material is at present unavailable.Substantially, Prof. Bull's paper was a verification of the work of Dr. Oswald and indicated the fruitfulness of this approach to the problem of Mechanical Translation. A discussion of the means required to further extend the investigations showed clearly that the analysis could be facilitated by the use of punched cards. Such mechanization can enormously increase our knowledge of language structure, whereas the present handwritten and hand-sorting techniques are far too slow to materially aid in the solution of the problems of mechanical translation. Prof. Bull accepted the suggestion that he investigate the possibilities of employing punched cards as a means of extending the scope of his research.The third paper was presented by Prof. Erwin Reifler and was entitled "General Mechanical Translation and Universal Grammar." Prof. Reifler has inaugurated a new school of linguis-tic investigation which is currently known as "Comparative Semantics." Prof. Reifler has been investigating languages in order to discover such patterns of verbally conveying meaning, underlying the actual words and syntax of a language, as are common to all languages. Such a structure could form a "universal grammar."Mechanical translation poses the following question: "Is it possible to solve the problems of Mechanical Translation in such a way that one and the same preparation of the code text may serve for a Mechanical Translation into many different languages?" The existence of a universal grammar would most assuredly assist in the solution of this problem if such a grammar could be shown to exist. To date, the science of linguistics states that no such universal grammar exists, but linguists do speak of language universals. In particular, many highly interesting cases of parallel development in the evolution of the expression of meaning amongst structurally unrelated languages do exist. The universals may be used to re-adjust the language structure to form what Prof. Reifler terms "adjusted model target languages." This is in line with the recommendation that Prof. Stuart C. Dodd presented in his paper on "Model English." Use of the adjustment clearly simplifies the mechanical translation problem and the engineering re-quired for its solution.The discussion of the paper reinforced the conclusions of the discussion on Prof. Dodd's paper. It is encouraging to note that where Prof. Dodd has restricted his considerations to English and hypothesized extension to other languages, Prof. Reifler, working from a completely different viewpoint and another purpose in mind, arrived at the same conclusions as to the feasibility of regularizing a language and further demonstrated our ability to regularize major language groups of the world. Dr. Huskey reviewed the problems encountered in programming German translations in collaboration with Dr. Oswald. The problems encountered were, to a certain extent, peculiar to the SWAC, which was the machine available for the translation. The basic problems were the construction of a vocabulary for entry into the machine, the derivation of a system of addressing to find particular units in the memory, and the syntactic programming to obtain correct sentence structure in the output of the machine. These problems are basic to any machine translation. In general, the design of the machine will govern the type of programming required. The use of two types of memories seems desirable -the first having short access time and the second, which will contain words of infrequent use, having a longer access time. The arithmetic operations required for the construction of the correct sentence structure will be dependent upon the arithmetic devices provided with the machine. The complexity of the machine, if a machine is constructed for the sole purpose of mechanical translation, will be a function of the degree of accuracy required in the translation. This in turn will be dependent upon the allocation of time for pre-editing the material for machine input and post-editing of the machine output.The second paper was presented by Mr. J. W. Forrester, Director of Digital Computer Laboratory, M.I.T., on the subject of "Problems of Storage and Cost." This also was presented in the form of a talk, no written material being distributed.Mr. Forrester presented no cost items that are not known to computers and business machine engineers. His major purpose was to indicate to the linguists present the cost of the machine that they were proposing. Techniques employing magnetic drums, magnetic tapes, and electrostatic storage devices singly and in combination with one another were presented for consideration. The most economical array consists of an intermediate memory and computing unit of low access time and a large scale memory of long access time. The cost of the machine is dependent on the same considerations as listed by Dr. Huskey.The third paper was presented by Dr. A. Donald Booth, Director, Computation Laboratory, Birkbeck College, London. The title was changed from that listed in the program to "Some Methods of Mechanized Translation," which was written in collaboration with Dr. R. H. Richens of the Biological Laboratories of the University of London. General principles of mechanical translation, as scheduled and pro-grammed on the computer built by Dr. Booth for the University of London, were discussed. The use of punched card machinery was compared with the use of an automatic digital computer. Time comparisons were worked out that favored the use of the automatic digital computing machinery by a time ratio of at least 7 to 1. Examples of translations in the field of genetics from Albanian, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Latin, Latvian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Rumanian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Arabic, and Japanese were given. Usable translations in each of these cases, despite the limited storage available with Dr. Booth's computer, were obtained. Post-editing was necessary in all cases, however, to produce a readable, although not necessarily more intelligible translation.The fourth paper was presented by Prof. Wm. E. Bull and was concerned with the possible future effect of the concept of mechanical translation on the teaching of foreign languages. Prof. Bull stated that the concept of mechanical translation necessitates a completely new approach to the problem of language teaching. An analogy was drawn between a machine into whose memory a vocabulary had not been incorporated and a student into whose brain such a vocabulary must also be introduced. The approach in teaching syntactic connections to both the machine and to the student in terms of the programming required to obtain syntactically correct constructions from the memory storage was discussed. Prof. Bull reached the conclusions that the same considerations that govern the choice of vocabulary and the use of intermediate and large scale memories in the machine could be advantageously incorporated into the teaching of languages as well as the design of machines for mechanical translation.Dr. Louis N. Ridenour was unfortunately unable to attend the conference, and his paper on "Learning Machines" was not presented.In his place, Prof. James W. Perry, Research Associate, Center for International Studies, M.I.T., presented a paper on "Machine Techniques for Index Searching and for Machine Translation." This paper was an elaboration of the talk that Prof. Perry presented at the opening public session of the conference. To a considerable extent, the concepts in the paper were based on Prof. Perry's experience in setting up coding and indexing systems for hand-sorted punched cards, and also on his experience with the library-cataloging machine developed by IBM. Fundamentally, the same conclusions as to memory and access times were reached by Prof. Perry as had been previously derived by the other participants in the conference.Session VI -June 20, 1952 Chairman -Prof. Wm. E. Bull The closing session of the conference was devoted to a consideration of organization for future research. A seven-man committee was organized at this session to act as coordinators and consultants for further work. The committee is composed of Dr. Yehoshua Bar-Hillel, as chairman; Prof. Leon Dostert, secretary; and Dr. Olaf Helmer, Dr. Harry D. Huskey, Prof. Erwin Reifler, and Mr. A. C. Reynolds, Jr., as members. Dr. A. Donald Booth was placed on the committee as the European representative.In the organization for future research, the conferees were asked to what degree they were interested in future work and in which areas they wished to participate.Dr. Booth will continue with the work he has already started with Dr. R. H. Richens at the University of London.Prof. Bull is interested in the field of linguistic problems of translation and as part of his research activity will continue with his study of the Spanish language. He is not concerned with mechanical translation as such, but recognizes the necessity for, and the value of, his linguistic work in reaching this goal.Dr. Dodd will continue his work in the studies of regularizing languages and determine the degree of extension possible in languages other than English.Prof. Dostert intends to work actively, through the Institute of Languages and Linguistics, Georgetown University, in the derivation of principles for the use of machines in translation.Dr. Olaf Helmer stated that the Rand Corporation is interested from the theoretical viewpoint, but in all probability at the present time will confine itself only to theoretical work as secondary to its work on computers.Dr. Huskey had no comment other than that he would continue to collaborate with Prof. Oswald.Prof. Oswald is interested in extending the concept of micro-glossaries and in the study of syntactic relations. He intends to continue work in the programming of translation for machines.Prof. Reifler is extremely interested in demonstrating the existence of universals in gram-mar, and in applying these universals to the problem of mechanical translation.Dr. Bar-Hillel will continue his basic research in symbolic logic and its applications to the field of mechanical translation.Dr. Jerome B. Wiesner, speaking for the M.I.T. staff present, stated that the research laboratory at M.I.T. is very much interested in the application of computer techniques to the problem of mechanical translation and that if a concrete program was formulated, financial support could quite conceivably be forthcoming from the Research Laboratory.Mr. Duncan Harkin of the Department of Defense stated that the Department of Defense was vitally interested in this problem and, like Dr. Wiesner, if a concrete proposal for such a translation and subsequent demonstration could be formulated, the Department of Defense would be prepared to give financial backing.Mr. Reynolds stated that IBM was interested in the application of its present punched card techniques and its computers to this problem and as such would participate on the basis of exchange of theoretical information with the members of the conference.The conference closed on a note of optimism regarding the potentialities now known to be physically present in the concept of mechanical translation. | null | null | null | null | Main paper:
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The concept of mechanical translation originated in two areas, the first being cryptographic work conducted by various governments during the late war, and the second being the successful inauguration and employment of the simultaneous translation schemes presently employed by the UN and other internation conferences. Broken down into basic essentials, translation consists of memory scanning for identification of meaning in two different symbolic systems, called languages, and simultaneous editing by the translator to convert the syntactical relationships of the language being translated to those of the translated language. Of these, the memory scanning is definitely paralleled in computer techniques. If one to one correlations in meaning existed between words of different languages, programming on existing computers would be completely successful. Syntactical relationships and shading of meaning by the context of the words makes the problem of mechanization exceedingly difficult in the absence of a mechanical means of converting from one syntax to another.Much work was stimulated by a memorandum, Translation, written by Dr. Warren Weaver of the Rockefeller Foundation.which was distributed to a selected group of linguists, psychologists, computer engineers, and philosophers. Dr. Yehoshua Bar-Hillel, acting under a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation and then con-* For a linguist's view of the same Conference, see MT, Vol. I, No. 2 , "Report on the First Conference on Mechanical Translation," Erwin Reifler, pp. 23-32. A list of participants in the Conference appears on p. 24 of that article. ducting his research at M.I.T., acted as the coordinator of the groups actively interested in mechanical translations. As part of his work, Dr. Bar-Hillel prepared a summary entitled "Present Interest in Mechanical Translation," listing the individuals actively working on the application of computers and computer techniques to mechanical translation. In 1952 he organized a Conference on Mechanical Translation at M.I.T.This report is concerned with providing a precis of the papers and discussions at the Conference.The Public Session of the Conference on Mechanical Translation was announced by invitations extended by Dr. Yehoshua Bar-Hillel to persons who might be interested in the problems of mechanical translation and, in particular to members of the Conference on Speech Communication which immediately preceded the Conference on Mechanical Translation. At the public session papers were not presented, but short talks were given by each of the five participants outlining their work in the field and their tentative proposals for future work.Dr. Bar-Hillel discussed the need and possibilities for mechanical translation, the need primarily arising in the fields of science and of diplomacy, for analysis of popular periodicals of various countries. Although a person may be versed in the cultural or popular language of several countries, this does not necessarily mean that the same individual is capable of translating scientific treatises originating in the same countries. This is due to the well known fact that each scientific discipline creates its own jargon, assigning very specific meanings to common words of the language, these meanings being peculiar to the particular science itself. There is, therefore, a need for translators who are capable of making meaningful interpretations, not only in the more popular writings, but also in specific areas of scientific research. The volume of material appearing in popular periodicals is appalling in its magnitude and complete scanning of a particular nation's output is virtually impossible as long as human translators must be relied upon. He concluded that it is in these areas that mechanical translation is capable of making a major contribution to society.Prof. Leon Dostert, Director of the Institute of Languages and Linguistics, Georgetown University, Washington, D. C., spoke on the subject of human translation versus machine translation. Prof. Dostert drew on his experience in setting up the translation system employed at the Nuremburg trials in Germany and in working with IBM in the development of the simultaneous translation system used at the UN and other international conferences. In discussing this problem, he made the statement that, except in the very specialized areas discussed by Dr. Bar-Hillel, there is no shortage of human translators, owing apparently to the fact that the current workload is regulated by their availability. The contribution a machine can make is in the processing of the vast amount of material that is currently not even being touched in the specialized fields. He described systems employed in setting up efficient simultaneous translation systems and also rapid printed translations in international gatherings. These systems were remarkably similar in their organization to machine organization for computer application. He confessed that he came to the Conference as a sceptic. (Later in the Conference he became convinced that mechanical translation would be possible.)Dr. Olaf Helmer, Director of Research, Mathematical Division, Rand Corporation, Santa Monica, California, discussed the structure of the problem of mechanical translation. Meanings of particular words and phrases may be idiomatic or may be changed or modified by the context in which they appear. Further, each group of languages has its own syntactical relationships which are peculiar to the group,and most frequently also vary in minor details among members of the same group. The machine must be capable of resolving idiomatic, contextual, and syntactic ambiguities if human editing is to be kept at a minimum and maximum intelligibility is to be achieved. Dr. Helmer discussed schemes that have been tentatively investigated by the Rand Corporation for solving this problem. His conclusion is that high speed general purpose computing machines will be able to handle the main translation task.Dr. Andrew D. Booth, Director, The Electronic Computer Section, Birkbeck College, University of London, discussed the popular misconceptions covered by the question, "How intelligent can a machine translator be ?" The conclusions necessarily were that "intelligence" as applied to machines involves a complete misunderstanding both of intelligence and of machines. No intelligence is required, on the part of the machine at least, in mechanical translation.Dr. James W. Perry, Center of International Studies, M.I.T., discussed machine techniques and index searching and translation. The basis of Dr. Perry's talk was the index searching machine developed by IBM to solve the problem of scanning vast amounts of information and extracting certain specific items. He discussed the development of coding on punched cards in order to employ a machine at maximum efficiency. He concluded on the basis of his acquaintanceship with existing machines and machine techniques that mechanical translation was not only feasible but far closer to realizations than possibly the audience recognized.A period of discussion from the floor followed the presentation of the talks. There was general agreement on the part of both the panel and the audience that mechanical translation was feasible. It was interesting to note that the computer engineers present presented all of the difficulties standing in the way of producing a mechanical translator from the engineering standpoint; the linguist, from his standpoint; and the psychologists and philosophers from the standpoint of their respective disciplines. Each agreed, however, that, if the other two groups did their work, we could in the near future produce adequate and intelligible machine programmed translations. Washington, presented the first two papers of the morning session entitled, "Mechanical Translation with Pre-editing,"and "Writing for Mechanical Translation."The first paper concerned itself with the fact that syntactical relationships differ amongst languages. For ease in programming on a mechanical translator, a source language should be arranged according to the syntax of the target language (language into which the material is being translated). Where this is not possible due to the fact that the syntax is inseparable from the actual word form (such as the dative case in Latin) certain keys, such as capital letters or diacritical marks, can be inserted as recognizable signals for a machine whose input is a print scanning device. Pre-editing then would imply the use of a human editor to rearrange the source language insofar as possible in accordance with the syntax of the target language, and secondly, employment of various inserted signals to notify the machine of syntactical arrangements inseparable from the word form.The second paper, on "Writing for Mechanical Translation," would necessitate the training of all writers, and more particularly their secretaries,in the required conventions for arrangement of an article for translation into a given language. The discussion of these two papers indicated that the use of a pre-editor, rather than educating all authors and all secretaries in techniques of writing for mechanical translations, is far preferable. As a matter of fact, a person skilled in keyboard operation could be readily trained to insert syntactical recognition signals at the time of keying the text into the machine. This, of course, also holds for the preparation of a manuscript for machine scanning.Dr. Yehoshua Bar-Hillel presented a paper on Mechanical Translation employing a post-editor. Since a one-to-one correlation does not exist between meanings of words expressing essentially the same idea in various languages, if a machine operates on a comparison basis only, or even if it is capable of computing syntactical relationship, a multiplicity of words in the target language can be derived for any single word of the source language. For a particular sentence, say of 10 words length, this can easily result in possible combinations of words in the target language extending to several thousands of more or less meaningful combinations. It is necessary, therefore, to incorporate some form of post-editing in order to resolve the ambiguities inherent in this relationship between languages. Dr. Bar-Hillel is much concerned with the tremendously increased demands in terms of machine storage capacity which this situation implies. It is, however, not quite so grave as appears on the surface, since particularly in scientific writings, a vast number of one-to-one correlations do exist.(The subject of glossaries to handle the scientific translations was covered in a later session of the conference.)The fourth paper, "Model English for Mechanical Translation" was presented by Prof. Stuart C. Dodd, Director, Washington Public Opinion Laboratory, University of Washington, Seattle. Dr. Dodd's paper concerned itself with the standardization of English syntax as a means of simplifying the use of English either as a source language or as a target language. A model language, as defined by Dr. Dodd, means any language in which the rules of syntax have been regularized, and in which familiarity of words is a governing criterion. The specific rules used in regularizing a language are itemized in the paper. The examples employed by Dr. Dodd indicate that regularizing, that is, constructing a model language, impaires but very slightly the readability and understandability of the subject matter. In English, at least, regularizing leads only to a certain quaintness of expression somewhat similar to the sentence structure employed by the Quakers.No attempts have been made as yet to regularize languages other than English, but at least for the Romance languages it seems on first view that such regularization can be accomplished.The particular rules of importance to Mechanical Translation are: one word order; one meaning for each word; and one form for each word.The experience gained in using model language at the Washington Public Opinion Laboratory indicates clearly that regularization of a language minimizes the points brought out by Dr. Bar-Hillel. The discussion showed that the conference was in substantial agreement that regularization by use of the concepts of a model language is feasible and directly applicable to the problems of mechanical translation. In particular, so far as the machines to be employed are concerned, the machine men present felt that it could be a decided advantage in reducing the complexity of equipment required.Chairman -A. C. Reynolds, Jr.Prof. Victor A. Oswald, Department of Germanic Languages, University of California, Los Angeles, presented the first paper entitled "Word-by-Word Translation." Prof. Oswald and Dr. Harry D. Huskey, Assistant Director, National Bureau of Standards Institute for Numerical Analysis, University of California, Los Angeles, jointly conducted experiments in the translation of a text in mathematics and another in brain surgery from German into English. The investigation by Dr. Oswald indicated that wordby-word translation from German into English was a virtually impossible task, chiefly because of the fact that German "articles" are also "words." Also, German sentence structure is such that word-by-word translation from German into English becomes virtually meaningless. Initial investigation resulted in a published report entitled, "Proposals for the Mechanical Resolution of German Syntax Patterns."Although word-by-word translation seemed impossible, breaking of the German sentence into a block-by-block formation, in which each block has a certain specific syntactical function, was far more profitable. Regularization of the German language and other languages of similar structure thus appears to be dependent upon such block-by-block analysis. The "Proposals" indicate that machines can be instructed to recognize syntactic connection upon this basis. The second major consideration for block-byblock translation is the problem of recognizing and interpreting the meaning-bearing words within a block. Syntactic connections will almost infallibly identify the word function and hence function recognition can be programmed. Linguistic research, particularly that conducted by Prof. William E. Bull, Department of Spanish, University of California, Los Angeles, (also a participant at the conference) shows clearly that the only meaning-bearing forms that can be isolated are nouns, verbs, adjectives, and possibly adverbs. In general, of these classes, nouns are by far the most useful and used bearers of meaning. No system yet proposed will solve the problem of multiple significance of the meaningbearing words. However, within a specific subject, a meaning-bearing word in general has only one specific meaning. This fact can be utilized to advantage in mechanical translation in which the criterion of meaning is determined by the subject matter being considered. Dr.Oswald proposed to take advantage of this fact by the use of what he termed micro-glossaries. These micro-glossaries would be constructed on the basis of the words most commonly used in specific subjects of interest; one such glossary being constructed for each subject to be translated. Mechanically, this means that two memories would be employed in a machine; one, a most used general vocabulary for the languages being processed; and two, a specific micro-glossary to assign specific meanings to words that would otherwise have a multiplicity of meaning; that is, if all their fields of usage were to be considered simultaneously. The concept of a micro-glossary and the use of blockby-block syntactic recognition in the machine met with favor from all the participants in the conference. The linguists appeared certain that block-by-block syntactic analysis of sentences could be accomplished and likewise were in agreement as to the reduction of ambiguity in the meaning of a word when only one field of interest was to be considered. The engineers present fully recognized the advantage to be gained from the reduction in size of memories growing out of the micro-glossary concept.Dr. Yehoshua Bar-Hillel presented the next paper on "Operational Syntax." No proposal had yet been presented to the conference regarding a means of programming a machine for recognizing syntactic connections. Dr. Bar-Hillel, examining this problem as a problem in symbolic logic, has discovered certain relationships that exist within the syntax of sentence structure. Further, he has discovered that these can be quite readily symbolized in the form of symbolic fractions. A simple multiplication of the fractions, which results in the cancellation of like quantities in the numerator and denominator, results in a unique symbol indicative of the functions of the word block so analyzed. Use of this analysis permits ready recognition of word blocks functioning as nouns, verbs, adjectives, or adverbs.The identification results in the ability to rearrange the syntax of the source language into the syntax of the target language. This is a simple arithmetic operation that can be readily programmed on a machine. The investigations to date have been preliminary, but indicate that the field is limited only by the number of languages which it would be profitable to so analyze.This was a completely new concept to the linguists of the conference who had intuitively felt that such a structure did exist but without the tools of symbolic logic had been unable to isolate the essential features that lead to the exceedingly simply arithmetic operations. The engineers immediately recognized the extreme advantages and the simplicity of the computing loops necessary to give the machine the ability to recognize word block functions and programmed reorganization of sentence structure.Prof. William N. Locke, Department of Modern Languages, M.I.T., presented the third paper on "Mechanical Translation of Printed and Spoken Material." This paper was presented orally only, no copies having been made for distribution.Prof. Locke is interested in the potentiality of using voice input to produce either a voice output or a printed output. He drew on work that has been conducted at the Bell Laboratories, at the Haskins Laboratories, at M.I.T., and elsewhere on the analysis of speech and the recognition of the components that form the spoken word. It appears at the present time that 8 such components uniquely determined a sound. Recognition of these 8 elements leads to the identification of one sound to the exclusion of all other sounds. It was Prof. Locke's contention that a machine could be built to recognize these 8 components and give a unique output (phoneme). The phoneme so constructed could be used with other phonemes to locate a specific unit within the memory whose meaning in the target language would be the same as the meaning in the source language. This of course pre-supposes the utilization of the philosophy in constructing memories as outlined in the previous pages of the conference.The discussion of Prof. Locke's paper was completely speculative since devices capable of so analyzing sounds are not yet in existence and it appears that it will be sometime in the future before such an art can become a science.Dr. Victor A. Oswald presented the first paper, entitled "Microsemantics." This paper continued the analysis that Dr. Oswald had presented on the preceding day in his discussion of word-by-word translation. He was now concerned with the fact that, in general, editing of the subject material would be required both before translation, in the source language, and after translation, in the target language. The problem is to simplify as much as possible the work required in such pre-editing and postediting.Assuming that syntactic considerations could be solved by such an analysis as that proposed by Dr. Bar-Hillel, the work of translation would be very greatly facilitated by the use of specialized glossaries concerned with the specific subject matter of the material being translated. (Dr. Oswald terms this type of glossary a micro-glossary, and the analysis that leads to it, microsemantical investigation.)The data obtained from every sort of linguistic frequency count when arranged according to descending numbers forms a monotonic descending curve. The words of highest frequency drop quite abruptly; words of medium frequency start flattening out; and words of highly specialized meaning that are used but seldom cause the curve to approach the horizontal axis asymptotically. The upper segment of the curve contains the words which are usually found in the normal or everyday vocabulary of a language, and contains about 80 per cent of the actual volume of the material. Unfortunately, these terms consist mainly of articles which convey but little meaning; the meaning-bearing forms, and in particular the nouns, are represented by the tail of the curve. All languages exhibit this characteristic curve. Thus, in order to find those words conveying the major meaning in any text, we are concerned with the tail of the curve rather than the large grouping of words occurring at the beginning of the curve. Considering that this particular section of the curve is representative of a micro-glossary of a specific subject in the language, the words of this section in general will have one and only one meaning.To verify this assumption, Dr. Oswald analyzed nearly a hundred papers in German on the subject of brain surgery. Technical nouns were abstracted from the first article. Additional nouns were added from the second article, and so through the complete series of texts employed. Each succeeding text was chosen from a different field of brain surgery. The amazing fact developed that after the fourth article, the glossary derived covered an average of 80 per cent of all the technical nouns in each succeeding article. From this, he constructed a microglossary that he considers representative of the field of brain surgery in the German language.A similar glossary of non-technical nouns was also compiled from the same series of articles. The frequency curve of the non-technical nouns was the same as that of the technical nouns. In other words, the brain surgeons are not only compelled to choose their technical nouns from a limited vocabulary, but their pattern of communication is so limited by practice and convention that even the range of non-technical nouns is predictable.We may generalize, although perhaps dangerously, that the same phenomenon will appear in all technical fields of a restricted nature.The micro-glossary was employed in programming translations on the SWAC in cooperation with Dr. Harry D. Huskey, Assistant Director, National Bureau of Standards Institute for Numerical Analysis, University of California, Los Angeles. The translations so obtained conveyed the meaning of the original article with correlations of meaning better than 90 per cent, on the assumption that the problems of syntax and contextual modification had previously been solved. Even without this assumption, the translated articles, when presented to a specialist in the field, in the raw un-edited form, conveyed the major portion of the meaning of the original article in the original language.The discussion that followed the paper clearly showed that the linguists working in other languages than German were in complete agreement as to the ease with which such microglossaries could be constructed. The engineers and scientists, from their knowledge of technical articles in their respective fields, indicated that the size of micro-glossaries in these fields would be as small in comparison to the complete vocabulary of a language as Dr. Oswald postulated. All agreed that the use of such micro-glossaries would enormously reduce the amount of memory required in a translating machine.In particular, the discussion centered on isolation of nouns as the major meaning-bearing words of a language. A rough analysis was made of the language being used around the table, and it was quite evident that in general verbs employed in conveying meaning through speech are in the present tense and in the vast majority of cases the verb is a form of the verb "to be." Since information is adequately conveyed by speech, it seemed reasonable to the participants that a translation which would ignore tenses and concentrate on nouns whichin newspaper parlance -convey the who, what, when, where, and how, of a statement, would adequately convey to a post-editor the necessary raw material to be employed in producing a polished translation. Dr. Oswald was congratulated by the group for his work and analysis of this phenomena.Prof. William E. Bull, Department of Spanish, University of California, Los Angeles, presented the second paper entitled "Frequency Problems in Mechanical Translation." Prof. Bull's investigation in Spanish literature paralleled the investigations of Dr. Oswald. Running texts in Spanish literature, which employed a general vocabulary rather than a restricted vocabulary, verify in detail the existence of the same phenomenon in general language as occurred in the restricted field of brain surgery, but Prof. Bull stressed that low frequency, unpredictable terms often carry critically important meaning.Prof. Bull exhibited numerous slides showing the frequency counts of words, the frequency occurrence of particular parts of speech, and the frequency counts of words within the classification of a particular part of speech. He discussed in some detail the problem of determining syntactic connections in Spanish sentences. He also discussed the type of work and the type of personnel required to extend knowledge in this field not only for Spanish but also for other languages of interest.Prof. Bull's paper was in part abstracted from a monograph not yet published. Therefore, he did not present a written paper to the participants of the conference, and this material is at present unavailable.Substantially, Prof. Bull's paper was a verification of the work of Dr. Oswald and indicated the fruitfulness of this approach to the problem of Mechanical Translation. A discussion of the means required to further extend the investigations showed clearly that the analysis could be facilitated by the use of punched cards. Such mechanization can enormously increase our knowledge of language structure, whereas the present handwritten and hand-sorting techniques are far too slow to materially aid in the solution of the problems of mechanical translation. Prof. Bull accepted the suggestion that he investigate the possibilities of employing punched cards as a means of extending the scope of his research.The third paper was presented by Prof. Erwin Reifler and was entitled "General Mechanical Translation and Universal Grammar." Prof. Reifler has inaugurated a new school of linguis-tic investigation which is currently known as "Comparative Semantics." Prof. Reifler has been investigating languages in order to discover such patterns of verbally conveying meaning, underlying the actual words and syntax of a language, as are common to all languages. Such a structure could form a "universal grammar."Mechanical translation poses the following question: "Is it possible to solve the problems of Mechanical Translation in such a way that one and the same preparation of the code text may serve for a Mechanical Translation into many different languages?" The existence of a universal grammar would most assuredly assist in the solution of this problem if such a grammar could be shown to exist. To date, the science of linguistics states that no such universal grammar exists, but linguists do speak of language universals. In particular, many highly interesting cases of parallel development in the evolution of the expression of meaning amongst structurally unrelated languages do exist. The universals may be used to re-adjust the language structure to form what Prof. Reifler terms "adjusted model target languages." This is in line with the recommendation that Prof. Stuart C. Dodd presented in his paper on "Model English." Use of the adjustment clearly simplifies the mechanical translation problem and the engineering re-quired for its solution.The discussion of the paper reinforced the conclusions of the discussion on Prof. Dodd's paper. It is encouraging to note that where Prof. Dodd has restricted his considerations to English and hypothesized extension to other languages, Prof. Reifler, working from a completely different viewpoint and another purpose in mind, arrived at the same conclusions as to the feasibility of regularizing a language and further demonstrated our ability to regularize major language groups of the world. Dr. Huskey reviewed the problems encountered in programming German translations in collaboration with Dr. Oswald. The problems encountered were, to a certain extent, peculiar to the SWAC, which was the machine available for the translation. The basic problems were the construction of a vocabulary for entry into the machine, the derivation of a system of addressing to find particular units in the memory, and the syntactic programming to obtain correct sentence structure in the output of the machine. These problems are basic to any machine translation. In general, the design of the machine will govern the type of programming required. The use of two types of memories seems desirable -the first having short access time and the second, which will contain words of infrequent use, having a longer access time. The arithmetic operations required for the construction of the correct sentence structure will be dependent upon the arithmetic devices provided with the machine. The complexity of the machine, if a machine is constructed for the sole purpose of mechanical translation, will be a function of the degree of accuracy required in the translation. This in turn will be dependent upon the allocation of time for pre-editing the material for machine input and post-editing of the machine output.The second paper was presented by Mr. J. W. Forrester, Director of Digital Computer Laboratory, M.I.T., on the subject of "Problems of Storage and Cost." This also was presented in the form of a talk, no written material being distributed.Mr. Forrester presented no cost items that are not known to computers and business machine engineers. His major purpose was to indicate to the linguists present the cost of the machine that they were proposing. Techniques employing magnetic drums, magnetic tapes, and electrostatic storage devices singly and in combination with one another were presented for consideration. The most economical array consists of an intermediate memory and computing unit of low access time and a large scale memory of long access time. The cost of the machine is dependent on the same considerations as listed by Dr. Huskey.The third paper was presented by Dr. A. Donald Booth, Director, Computation Laboratory, Birkbeck College, London. The title was changed from that listed in the program to "Some Methods of Mechanized Translation," which was written in collaboration with Dr. R. H. Richens of the Biological Laboratories of the University of London. General principles of mechanical translation, as scheduled and pro-grammed on the computer built by Dr. Booth for the University of London, were discussed. The use of punched card machinery was compared with the use of an automatic digital computer. Time comparisons were worked out that favored the use of the automatic digital computing machinery by a time ratio of at least 7 to 1. Examples of translations in the field of genetics from Albanian, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Latin, Latvian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Rumanian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Arabic, and Japanese were given. Usable translations in each of these cases, despite the limited storage available with Dr. Booth's computer, were obtained. Post-editing was necessary in all cases, however, to produce a readable, although not necessarily more intelligible translation.The fourth paper was presented by Prof. Wm. E. Bull and was concerned with the possible future effect of the concept of mechanical translation on the teaching of foreign languages. Prof. Bull stated that the concept of mechanical translation necessitates a completely new approach to the problem of language teaching. An analogy was drawn between a machine into whose memory a vocabulary had not been incorporated and a student into whose brain such a vocabulary must also be introduced. The approach in teaching syntactic connections to both the machine and to the student in terms of the programming required to obtain syntactically correct constructions from the memory storage was discussed. Prof. Bull reached the conclusions that the same considerations that govern the choice of vocabulary and the use of intermediate and large scale memories in the machine could be advantageously incorporated into the teaching of languages as well as the design of machines for mechanical translation.Dr. Louis N. Ridenour was unfortunately unable to attend the conference, and his paper on "Learning Machines" was not presented.In his place, Prof. James W. Perry, Research Associate, Center for International Studies, M.I.T., presented a paper on "Machine Techniques for Index Searching and for Machine Translation." This paper was an elaboration of the talk that Prof. Perry presented at the opening public session of the conference. To a considerable extent, the concepts in the paper were based on Prof. Perry's experience in setting up coding and indexing systems for hand-sorted punched cards, and also on his experience with the library-cataloging machine developed by IBM. Fundamentally, the same conclusions as to memory and access times were reached by Prof. Perry as had been previously derived by the other participants in the conference.Session VI -June 20, 1952 Chairman -Prof. Wm. E. Bull The closing session of the conference was devoted to a consideration of organization for future research. A seven-man committee was organized at this session to act as coordinators and consultants for further work. The committee is composed of Dr. Yehoshua Bar-Hillel, as chairman; Prof. Leon Dostert, secretary; and Dr. Olaf Helmer, Dr. Harry D. Huskey, Prof. Erwin Reifler, and Mr. A. C. Reynolds, Jr., as members. Dr. A. Donald Booth was placed on the committee as the European representative.In the organization for future research, the conferees were asked to what degree they were interested in future work and in which areas they wished to participate.Dr. Booth will continue with the work he has already started with Dr. R. H. Richens at the University of London.Prof. Bull is interested in the field of linguistic problems of translation and as part of his research activity will continue with his study of the Spanish language. He is not concerned with mechanical translation as such, but recognizes the necessity for, and the value of, his linguistic work in reaching this goal.Dr. Dodd will continue his work in the studies of regularizing languages and determine the degree of extension possible in languages other than English.Prof. Dostert intends to work actively, through the Institute of Languages and Linguistics, Georgetown University, in the derivation of principles for the use of machines in translation.Dr. Olaf Helmer stated that the Rand Corporation is interested from the theoretical viewpoint, but in all probability at the present time will confine itself only to theoretical work as secondary to its work on computers.Dr. Huskey had no comment other than that he would continue to collaborate with Prof. Oswald.Prof. Oswald is interested in extending the concept of micro-glossaries and in the study of syntactic relations. He intends to continue work in the programming of translation for machines.Prof. Reifler is extremely interested in demonstrating the existence of universals in gram-mar, and in applying these universals to the problem of mechanical translation.Dr. Bar-Hillel will continue his basic research in symbolic logic and its applications to the field of mechanical translation.Dr. Jerome B. Wiesner, speaking for the M.I.T. staff present, stated that the research laboratory at M.I.T. is very much interested in the application of computer techniques to the problem of mechanical translation and that if a concrete program was formulated, financial support could quite conceivably be forthcoming from the Research Laboratory.Mr. Duncan Harkin of the Department of Defense stated that the Department of Defense was vitally interested in this problem and, like Dr. Wiesner, if a concrete proposal for such a translation and subsequent demonstration could be formulated, the Department of Defense would be prepared to give financial backing.Mr. Reynolds stated that IBM was interested in the application of its present punched card techniques and its computers to this problem and as such would participate on the basis of exchange of theoretical information with the members of the conference.The conference closed on a note of optimism regarding the potentialities now known to be physically present in the concept of mechanical translation.
Appendix:
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524607d74ad17c1ef4fbd9dc1108232db2570d1e | 243627545 | null | Translation | The attached memorandum on translation from one language to another, and on the possibility of contributing to this process by the use of modern computing devices of very high speed, capacity, and logical flexibility, has been written with one hope only -that it might possibly serve in some small way as a stimulus to someone else, who would have the techniques, the knowledge, and the imagination to do something about it. I have worried a good deal about the probable naivete of the ideas here presented; but the subject seems to me so important that I am willing to expose my ignorance, hoping that it will be slightly shielded by my intentions. | {
"name": [
"Weaver, Warren"
],
"affiliation": [
null
]
} | null | null | Proceedings of the Conference on Mechanical Translation | 1952-06-01 | 0 | 0 | null | There is no need to do more than mention the obvious fact that a multiplicity of language impedes cultural interchange between the peoples of the earth, and is a serious deterrent to international understanding.The present memorandum, assuming the validity and importance of this fact, contains some comments and suggestions bearing on the possibility of contributing at least something to the solution of the world-wide translation problem through the use of electronic computers of great capacity, flexibility, and speed.The suggestions of this memorandum will surely be incomplete and naïve, and may well be patently silly to an expert in the field -for the author is certainly not such.During the war a distinguished mathematician whom we will call P, an ex-German who had spent some time at the University of Istanbul and had learned Turkish there, told W.W. the following story.A mathematical colleague, knowing that P had an amateur interest in cryptography, came to P one morning, stated that he had worked out a deciphering technique, and asked P to cook up some coded message on which he might try his scheme. P wrote out in Turkish a message containing about 100 words; simplified it by replacing the Turkish letters ç, ğ, ĭ, ö, ş, and ü by c, g, i, o, s, and u respectively; and then, using something more complicated than a simple substitution cipher, reduced the message to a column of five digit numbers. The next day (and the time required is significant) the colleague brought his result back, and remarked that they had apparently not had success. But the sequence of letters he reported, when properly broken up into words, and when mildly corrected (not enough correction being required really to bother anyone who knew the language well), turned out to be the original message in Turkish.The most important point, at least for present purposes, is that the decoding was done by someone who did not know Turkish, and did not know that the message was in Turkish. One remembers, by contrast, the well-known instance in World War I when it took our cryptographic forces weeks or months to determine that a captured message was coded from Japanese; and then took them a relatively short time to decipher it, once they knew what the language was.During the war, when the whole field of cryptography was so secret, it did not seem discreet to inquire concerning details of this story; but one could hardly avoid guessing that this process made use of frequencies of letters, letter combinations, intervals between letters and letter combinations, letter patterns, etc., which are to some significant degree independent of the language used. This at once leads one to suppose that, in the manifold instances in which man has invented and developed languages, there are certain invariant properties which are, again not precisely but to some statistically useful degree, common to all languages. This may be, for all I know, a famous theorem of philology.Indeed the well-known bow-wow, woof-woof, etc. theories of Müller and others, for the origin of languages, would of course lead one to expect common features in all languages, due to their essentially similar mechanism of development. And, in any event, there are obvious reasons which make the supposition a likely one. All languages -at least all the ones under consideration here -were invented and developed by men; and all men, and perhaps at different times. One would expect wide superficial differences; but it seems very reasonable to expect that certain basic, and probably very non-obvious, aspects be common to all the developments. It is just a little like observing that trees differ very widely in many characteristics, and yet there are basic common characteristics -certain essential qualities of "tree-ness," -that all trees share, whether they grow in Poland, or Ceylon, or Colombia. Furthermore (and this is the important point) a South American has, in general, no difficulty in recognizing that a Norwegian tree is a tree.The idea of basic common elements in all languages later received support from a remark which the mathematician and logician Reichenbach made to W.W. Reichenbach also spent some time in Istanbul, and like many of the German scholars who went there, he was perplexed and irritated by the Turkish language. The grammar of that language seemed to him so grotesque that eventually he was stimulated to study its logical structure. This, in turn, led him to become interested in the logical structure of the grammar of several other languages; and quite unaware of W.W.'s interest in the subject, Reichenbach remarked, "I was amazed to discover that for (apparently) widely varying languages, the basic logical structures have important common features." Reichenbach said he was publishing this, and would send the material to W.W.; but nothing has ever appeared. "One thing I wanted to ask you about is this. A most serious problem, for UNESCO and for the constructive and peaceful future of the planet, is the problem of translation, as it unavoidably affects the communication between peoples. Huxley has recently told me that they are appalled by the magnitude and the importance of the translation job."Recognizing fully, even though necessarily vaguely, the semantic difficulties because of multiple meanings, etc., I have wondered if it were unthinkable to design a computer which would translate. Even if it would translate only scientific material (where the semantic difficulties are very notably less), and even if it did produce an inelegant (but intelligible) result, it would seem to me worth while."Also knowing nothing official about, but having guessed and inferred considerable about, powerful new mechanized methods in cryptography -methods which I believe succeed even when one does not know what language has been codedone naturally wonders if the problem of translation could conceivably be treated as a problem in cryptography. When I look at an article in Russian, I say "This is really written in English, but it has been coded in some strange symbols. I will now proceed to decode."Have you ever thought about this? As a linguist and expert on computers, do you think it is worth thinking about?" Professor Wiener, in a letter dated April 30, 1947, said in reply:"Second -as to the problem of mechanical translation, I frankly am afraid the boundaries of words in different languages are too vague and the emotional and international connotations are too extensive to make any quasi mechanical translation scheme very hopeful. I will admit that basic English seems to indicate that we can go further than we have generally done in the mechanization of speech, but you must remember that in certain respects basic English is the reverse of mechanical and throws upon such words as 'get,' a burden, which is much greater than most words carry in conventional English. At the present time, the mechanization of language, beyond such a stage as the design of photoelectric reading opportunities for the blind, seems very premature. By the way, I have been fascinated by McCulloch's work on such apparatus, and, as you probably know, he finds the wiring diagram of apparatus of this kind turns out to be surprisingly like the microscopic analogy of the visual cortex in the brain."To this, W.W. replied on May 9, 1947: "I am disappointed but not surprised by your comments on the translation problem. The difficulty you mention concerning Basic seems to me to have a rather easy answer. It is, of course, true that Basic puts multiple use on an action verb such as 'get.' But even so, the two-word combinations such as 'get up,' 'get over,' 'get back,' etc., are, in Basic, not really very numerous. Suppose we take a vocabulary of 2,000 words, and admit for good measure all the two-word combinations as if they were single words. The vocabulary is still only four million: and that is not so formidable a number to a modern computer, is it?" Thus this attempt to interest Wiener, who seemed so ideally equipped to consider the problem, failed to produce any real result. This must in fact be accepted as exceedingly discouraging, for if there are any real possibilities, one would expect Wiener to be just the person to develop them.The idea has, however, been seriously considered elsewhere.The first instance known to W.W., subsequent to his own notion about it, was described in a memorandum dated February 12, 1948, written by ; but only with the problem of mechanizing a dictionary. Their proposal then was that one first "sense" the letters of a word, and have the machine see whether or not its memory contains precisely the word in question. If so, the machine simply produces the translation (which is the rub; of course "the" translation doesn't exist) of this word. If this exact word is not contained in the memory, then the machine discards the last letter of the word, and tries over. If this fails, it discards another letter, and tries again. After it has found the largest initial combination of letters which is in the dictionary, it "looks up" the whole discarded portion in a special "grammatical annex" of the dictionary. Thus confronted by "running," it might find "run" and then find out what the ending (n) ing does to "run."Thus their interest was, at least at that time, confined to the problem of the mechanization of a dictionary which in a reasonably efficient way would handle all forms of all words. W.W. has no more recent news of this affair.Very recently the newspapers have carried stories of the use of one of the California computers as a translator. The published reports do not indicate much more than a word-into-word sort of translation, and there has been no indication, at least that W.W. has seen, of the proposed manner of handling the problems of multiple meaning, context, word order, etc.This last named attempt, or planned attempt, has already drawn forth inevitable scorn; Mr. Max Zeldner, in a letter to the Herald Tribune on June 13, 1949, stating that the most you could expect of a machine translation of the fifty-five Hebrew words which form the 23rd Psalm would start out "Lord my shepherd no I will lack," and would close "But good and kindness he will chase me all days of my life; and I shall rest in the house of Lord to length days." Mr. Zeldner points out that a great Hebrew poet once said that translation "is like kissing your sweetheart through a veil." It is, in fact, amply clear that a translation procedure that does little more than handle a one-to-one correspondence of words can not hope to be useful for problems of "literary" translation, in which style is important, and in which the problems of idiom, multiple meanings, etc., are frequent.Even this very restricted type of translation may, however, very well have important use. Large volumes of technical material might, for example, be usefully, even if not at all elegantly, handled this way. Technical writing is unfortunately not always straight-forward and simple in style; but at least the problem of multiple meaning is enormously simpler. In mathematics, to take what is probably the easiest example, one can very nearly say that each word, within the general context of a mathematical article, has one and only one meaning,The foregoing remarks about computer translation schemes which have been reported, do not however seem to W.W. to give an appropriately hopeful indication of what the future possibilities may be. Those possibilities should doubtless be indicated by persons who have special knowledge of languages and of their comparative anatomy. But again at the risk of being foolishly naïve, it seems interesting to indicate four types of attack, on levels of increasing sophistication.First, let us think of a way in which the problem of multiple meaning can, in principle at least, be solved. If one examines the words in a book, one at a time as through an opaque mask with a hole in it one word wide, then it is obviously impossible to determine, one at a time, the meaning of the words. "Fast" may mean "rapid"; or it may mean "motionless"; and there is no way of telling which. This is a question concerning the statistical semantic character of language which could certainly be answered, at least in some interesting and perhaps in a useful way. Clearly N varies with the type of writing in question. It may be zero for an article known to be about a specific mathematical subject. It may be very low for chemistry, physics, engineering, etc. If N were equal to 5, and the article or book in question were on some sociological subject, would there be a probability of .95 that the choice of meaning would be correct 98% of the time? Doubtless not: but a statement of this sort could be made, and values of N could be determined that would meet given demands.Ambiguity, moreover, attaches primarily to nouns, verbs, and adjectives; and actually (at least so I suppose) to relatively few nouns, verbs, and adjectives. Here again is a good subject for study concerning the statistical semantic character of languages. But one can imagine using a value of N that varies from word to word, is zero for "he," "the," etc., and which needs to be large only rather occasionally. Or would it determine unique meaning in a satisfactory fraction of cases, to examine not the 2N adjacent words, but perhaps the 2N adjacent nouns? What choice of adjacent words maximizes the probability of correct choice of meaning, and at the same time leads to a small value of N?Thus one is led to the concept of a translation process in which, in determining meaning for a word, account is taken of the immediate (2N word) context. It would hardly be practical to do this by means of a generalized dictionary which contains all possible phases 2N+1 words long: for the number of such phases is horrifying, even to a modern electronic computer. But it does seen likely that some reasonable way could be found of using the micro-context to settle the difficult cases of ambiguity.A more general basis for hoping that a computer could be designed which would cope with a useful part of the problem of translation is to be Probably only Shannon himself, at this stage, can be a good judge of the possibilities in this direction; but as was expressed in W.W.'s original letter to Wiener, it is very tempting to say that a book written in Chinese is simply a book written in English which was coded into the "Chinese code." If we have useful methods for solving almost any cryptographic problem, may it not be that with proper interpretation we already have useful methods for translation?* For a very simplified version, see "The Mathematics of Communication," by Warren Weaver, Scientific American, Vol. 181, No. 1, July 1949, pp. 11-15 . Shannon's original papers, as published in the Bell System Technical Journal, and a longer and more detailed interpretation by W.W., are about to appear as a memoir on communication, published by the University of Illinois Press. A book by Shannon on this subject is also to appear soon.Warren WeaverCarlsbad, New Mexico July 15, 1949 | null | null | null | null | Main paper:
translation l) preliminary remarks:
There is no need to do more than mention the obvious fact that a multiplicity of language impedes cultural interchange between the peoples of the earth, and is a serious deterrent to international understanding.The present memorandum, assuming the validity and importance of this fact, contains some comments and suggestions bearing on the possibility of contributing at least something to the solution of the world-wide translation problem through the use of electronic computers of great capacity, flexibility, and speed.The suggestions of this memorandum will surely be incomplete and naïve, and may well be patently silly to an expert in the field -for the author is certainly not such.During the war a distinguished mathematician whom we will call P, an ex-German who had spent some time at the University of Istanbul and had learned Turkish there, told W.W. the following story.A mathematical colleague, knowing that P had an amateur interest in cryptography, came to P one morning, stated that he had worked out a deciphering technique, and asked P to cook up some coded message on which he might try his scheme. P wrote out in Turkish a message containing about 100 words; simplified it by replacing the Turkish letters ç, ğ, ĭ, ö, ş, and ü by c, g, i, o, s, and u respectively; and then, using something more complicated than a simple substitution cipher, reduced the message to a column of five digit numbers. The next day (and the time required is significant) the colleague brought his result back, and remarked that they had apparently not had success. But the sequence of letters he reported, when properly broken up into words, and when mildly corrected (not enough correction being required really to bother anyone who knew the language well), turned out to be the original message in Turkish.The most important point, at least for present purposes, is that the decoding was done by someone who did not know Turkish, and did not know that the message was in Turkish. One remembers, by contrast, the well-known instance in World War I when it took our cryptographic forces weeks or months to determine that a captured message was coded from Japanese; and then took them a relatively short time to decipher it, once they knew what the language was.During the war, when the whole field of cryptography was so secret, it did not seem discreet to inquire concerning details of this story; but one could hardly avoid guessing that this process made use of frequencies of letters, letter combinations, intervals between letters and letter combinations, letter patterns, etc., which are to some significant degree independent of the language used. This at once leads one to suppose that, in the manifold instances in which man has invented and developed languages, there are certain invariant properties which are, again not precisely but to some statistically useful degree, common to all languages. This may be, for all I know, a famous theorem of philology.Indeed the well-known bow-wow, woof-woof, etc. theories of Müller and others, for the origin of languages, would of course lead one to expect common features in all languages, due to their essentially similar mechanism of development. And, in any event, there are obvious reasons which make the supposition a likely one. All languages -at least all the ones under consideration here -were invented and developed by men; and all men, and perhaps at different times. One would expect wide superficial differences; but it seems very reasonable to expect that certain basic, and probably very non-obvious, aspects be common to all the developments. It is just a little like observing that trees differ very widely in many characteristics, and yet there are basic common characteristics -certain essential qualities of "tree-ness," -that all trees share, whether they grow in Poland, or Ceylon, or Colombia. Furthermore (and this is the important point) a South American has, in general, no difficulty in recognizing that a Norwegian tree is a tree.The idea of basic common elements in all languages later received support from a remark which the mathematician and logician Reichenbach made to W.W. Reichenbach also spent some time in Istanbul, and like many of the German scholars who went there, he was perplexed and irritated by the Turkish language. The grammar of that language seemed to him so grotesque that eventually he was stimulated to study its logical structure. This, in turn, led him to become interested in the logical structure of the grammar of several other languages; and quite unaware of W.W.'s interest in the subject, Reichenbach remarked, "I was amazed to discover that for (apparently) widely varying languages, the basic logical structures have important common features." Reichenbach said he was publishing this, and would send the material to W.W.; but nothing has ever appeared. "One thing I wanted to ask you about is this. A most serious problem, for UNESCO and for the constructive and peaceful future of the planet, is the problem of translation, as it unavoidably affects the communication between peoples. Huxley has recently told me that they are appalled by the magnitude and the importance of the translation job."Recognizing fully, even though necessarily vaguely, the semantic difficulties because of multiple meanings, etc., I have wondered if it were unthinkable to design a computer which would translate. Even if it would translate only scientific material (where the semantic difficulties are very notably less), and even if it did produce an inelegant (but intelligible) result, it would seem to me worth while."Also knowing nothing official about, but having guessed and inferred considerable about, powerful new mechanized methods in cryptography -methods which I believe succeed even when one does not know what language has been codedone naturally wonders if the problem of translation could conceivably be treated as a problem in cryptography. When I look at an article in Russian, I say "This is really written in English, but it has been coded in some strange symbols. I will now proceed to decode."Have you ever thought about this? As a linguist and expert on computers, do you think it is worth thinking about?" Professor Wiener, in a letter dated April 30, 1947, said in reply:"Second -as to the problem of mechanical translation, I frankly am afraid the boundaries of words in different languages are too vague and the emotional and international connotations are too extensive to make any quasi mechanical translation scheme very hopeful. I will admit that basic English seems to indicate that we can go further than we have generally done in the mechanization of speech, but you must remember that in certain respects basic English is the reverse of mechanical and throws upon such words as 'get,' a burden, which is much greater than most words carry in conventional English. At the present time, the mechanization of language, beyond such a stage as the design of photoelectric reading opportunities for the blind, seems very premature. By the way, I have been fascinated by McCulloch's work on such apparatus, and, as you probably know, he finds the wiring diagram of apparatus of this kind turns out to be surprisingly like the microscopic analogy of the visual cortex in the brain."To this, W.W. replied on May 9, 1947: "I am disappointed but not surprised by your comments on the translation problem. The difficulty you mention concerning Basic seems to me to have a rather easy answer. It is, of course, true that Basic puts multiple use on an action verb such as 'get.' But even so, the two-word combinations such as 'get up,' 'get over,' 'get back,' etc., are, in Basic, not really very numerous. Suppose we take a vocabulary of 2,000 words, and admit for good measure all the two-word combinations as if they were single words. The vocabulary is still only four million: and that is not so formidable a number to a modern computer, is it?" Thus this attempt to interest Wiener, who seemed so ideally equipped to consider the problem, failed to produce any real result. This must in fact be accepted as exceedingly discouraging, for if there are any real possibilities, one would expect Wiener to be just the person to develop them.The idea has, however, been seriously considered elsewhere.The first instance known to W.W., subsequent to his own notion about it, was described in a memorandum dated February 12, 1948, written by ; but only with the problem of mechanizing a dictionary. Their proposal then was that one first "sense" the letters of a word, and have the machine see whether or not its memory contains precisely the word in question. If so, the machine simply produces the translation (which is the rub; of course "the" translation doesn't exist) of this word. If this exact word is not contained in the memory, then the machine discards the last letter of the word, and tries over. If this fails, it discards another letter, and tries again. After it has found the largest initial combination of letters which is in the dictionary, it "looks up" the whole discarded portion in a special "grammatical annex" of the dictionary. Thus confronted by "running," it might find "run" and then find out what the ending (n) ing does to "run."Thus their interest was, at least at that time, confined to the problem of the mechanization of a dictionary which in a reasonably efficient way would handle all forms of all words. W.W. has no more recent news of this affair.Very recently the newspapers have carried stories of the use of one of the California computers as a translator. The published reports do not indicate much more than a word-into-word sort of translation, and there has been no indication, at least that W.W. has seen, of the proposed manner of handling the problems of multiple meaning, context, word order, etc.This last named attempt, or planned attempt, has already drawn forth inevitable scorn; Mr. Max Zeldner, in a letter to the Herald Tribune on June 13, 1949, stating that the most you could expect of a machine translation of the fifty-five Hebrew words which form the 23rd Psalm would start out "Lord my shepherd no I will lack," and would close "But good and kindness he will chase me all days of my life; and I shall rest in the house of Lord to length days." Mr. Zeldner points out that a great Hebrew poet once said that translation "is like kissing your sweetheart through a veil." It is, in fact, amply clear that a translation procedure that does little more than handle a one-to-one correspondence of words can not hope to be useful for problems of "literary" translation, in which style is important, and in which the problems of idiom, multiple meanings, etc., are frequent.Even this very restricted type of translation may, however, very well have important use. Large volumes of technical material might, for example, be usefully, even if not at all elegantly, handled this way. Technical writing is unfortunately not always straight-forward and simple in style; but at least the problem of multiple meaning is enormously simpler. In mathematics, to take what is probably the easiest example, one can very nearly say that each word, within the general context of a mathematical article, has one and only one meaning,The foregoing remarks about computer translation schemes which have been reported, do not however seem to W.W. to give an appropriately hopeful indication of what the future possibilities may be. Those possibilities should doubtless be indicated by persons who have special knowledge of languages and of their comparative anatomy. But again at the risk of being foolishly naïve, it seems interesting to indicate four types of attack, on levels of increasing sophistication.First, let us think of a way in which the problem of multiple meaning can, in principle at least, be solved. If one examines the words in a book, one at a time as through an opaque mask with a hole in it one word wide, then it is obviously impossible to determine, one at a time, the meaning of the words. "Fast" may mean "rapid"; or it may mean "motionless"; and there is no way of telling which. This is a question concerning the statistical semantic character of language which could certainly be answered, at least in some interesting and perhaps in a useful way. Clearly N varies with the type of writing in question. It may be zero for an article known to be about a specific mathematical subject. It may be very low for chemistry, physics, engineering, etc. If N were equal to 5, and the article or book in question were on some sociological subject, would there be a probability of .95 that the choice of meaning would be correct 98% of the time? Doubtless not: but a statement of this sort could be made, and values of N could be determined that would meet given demands.Ambiguity, moreover, attaches primarily to nouns, verbs, and adjectives; and actually (at least so I suppose) to relatively few nouns, verbs, and adjectives. Here again is a good subject for study concerning the statistical semantic character of languages. But one can imagine using a value of N that varies from word to word, is zero for "he," "the," etc., and which needs to be large only rather occasionally. Or would it determine unique meaning in a satisfactory fraction of cases, to examine not the 2N adjacent words, but perhaps the 2N adjacent nouns? What choice of adjacent words maximizes the probability of correct choice of meaning, and at the same time leads to a small value of N?Thus one is led to the concept of a translation process in which, in determining meaning for a word, account is taken of the immediate (2N word) context. It would hardly be practical to do this by means of a generalized dictionary which contains all possible phases 2N+1 words long: for the number of such phases is horrifying, even to a modern electronic computer. But it does seen likely that some reasonable way could be found of using the micro-context to settle the difficult cases of ambiguity.A more general basis for hoping that a computer could be designed which would cope with a useful part of the problem of translation is to be Probably only Shannon himself, at this stage, can be a good judge of the possibilities in this direction; but as was expressed in W.W.'s original letter to Wiener, it is very tempting to say that a book written in Chinese is simply a book written in English which was coded into the "Chinese code." If we have useful methods for solving almost any cryptographic problem, may it not be that with proper interpretation we already have useful methods for translation?* For a very simplified version, see "The Mathematics of Communication," by Warren Weaver, Scientific American, Vol. 181, No. 1, July 1949, pp. 11-15 . Shannon's original papers, as published in the Bell System Technical Journal, and a longer and more detailed interpretation by W.W., are about to appear as a memoir on communication, published by the University of Illinois Press. A book by Shannon on this subject is also to appear soon.Warren WeaverCarlsbad, New Mexico July 15, 1949
Appendix:
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"title": [],
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99001a274718e0a23c849257892a6dd36ab92e70 | 244077696 | null | Organisation and Method in Mechanical Translation Work | Certain postulates are posited as a basis for the orientation and organization of research in mechanical translation. They are the following: 1. The essential problem of mechanical translation is the establishment of acceptable correlation between the signs of one system (the source language) and those of another (the target language). 2. The signs of natural language, unlike the symbols of such systems as mathematics or chemistry, may be incomplete and multivalent. 3. The basic problem is the establishment of codes of systematic affixes to confer com pleteness and fixity in order to achieve acceptable correlation. 4. These systems of affixes must be such as to reflect the operations of translation and be programmable. Based on these postulates, a group research program calls for certain organization and methods. Those in the Georgetown research project are as follows: 1. The recognition that at this phase of the research the primary problem is one of linguistic and translation analysis. 2. The essential direction of the research is placed in the hands of a group of scientific linguists of diverse competences. 3. The linguists meet regularly in a seminar in which specific problems are presented by a member of the group for discussion, review, and comments by the other members. As a result of the examination of specific problems, certain conclusions are formulated, some of them preliminary in character. 4. Under the guidance of the committee of linguists a group of research assistants with at least Master's standing in linguistics, who participate in the seminar, carry out the detailed research based on such conclusions, in conjunction with a group of bilingual translation analysts. 5. The translation analysis is focused on material already translated in the field of chemistry. From this corpus, the material | {
"name": [
"Dostert, L. E."
],
"affiliation": [
null
]
} | null | null | Proceedings of the International Conference on Mechanical Translation | 1956-10-01 | 0 | 0 | null | 1. The essential problem of mechanical translation is the establishment of acceptable correlation between the signs of one system (the source language) and those of another (the target language). 2. The signs of natural language, unlike the symbols of such systems as mathematics or chemistry, may be incomplete and multivalent. 3. The basic problem is the establishment of codes of systematic affixes to confer com pleteness and fixity in order to achieve acceptable correlation. 4. These systems of affixes must be such as to reflect the operations of translation and be programmable. Based on these postulates, a group research program calls for certain organization and methods. Those in the Georgetown research project are as follows: 1. The recognition that at this phase of the research the primary problem is one of linguistic and translation analysis. 2. The essential direction of the research is placed in the hands of a group of scientific linguists of diverse competences. 3. The linguists meet regularly in a seminar in which specific problems are presented by a member of the group for discussion, review, and comments by the other members. As a result of the examination of specific problems, certain conclusions are formulated, some of them preliminary in character. 4. Under the guidance of the committee of linguists a group of research assistants with at least Master's standing in linguistics, who participate in the seminar, carry out the detailed research based on such conclusions, in conjunction with a group of bilingual translation analysts. 5. The translation analysis is focused on material already translated in the field of chemistry. From this corpus, the material is analyzed systematically for eventual coding on three broad levels conjointly: 1) lexical, 2) morphological, and 3) syntactic. 6. The lexical material is culled from the actual translated text. The decision items within a given context are identified. The contextual cue or cues to the choice decision are indicated. 7. In addition to establishing solutions for lexical multivalence, procedures are being developed to handle problems in morphology and syntax as they arise in the material. At this stage in the research only preliminary formulations exist. 8. In carding the lexical and grammatical data, an attempt is made to symbolize the categorization by a code as follows:The seminar will work as required by emerging experience with the assistance of consultants in the fields of coding techniques, computational techniques, symbolic logic, and mathematics. | null | null | null | null | Main paper:
:
1. The essential problem of mechanical translation is the establishment of acceptable correlation between the signs of one system (the source language) and those of another (the target language). 2. The signs of natural language, unlike the symbols of such systems as mathematics or chemistry, may be incomplete and multivalent. 3. The basic problem is the establishment of codes of systematic affixes to confer com pleteness and fixity in order to achieve acceptable correlation. 4. These systems of affixes must be such as to reflect the operations of translation and be programmable. Based on these postulates, a group research program calls for certain organization and methods. Those in the Georgetown research project are as follows: 1. The recognition that at this phase of the research the primary problem is one of linguistic and translation analysis. 2. The essential direction of the research is placed in the hands of a group of scientific linguists of diverse competences. 3. The linguists meet regularly in a seminar in which specific problems are presented by a member of the group for discussion, review, and comments by the other members. As a result of the examination of specific problems, certain conclusions are formulated, some of them preliminary in character. 4. Under the guidance of the committee of linguists a group of research assistants with at least Master's standing in linguistics, who participate in the seminar, carry out the detailed research based on such conclusions, in conjunction with a group of bilingual translation analysts. 5. The translation analysis is focused on material already translated in the field of chemistry. From this corpus, the material is analyzed systematically for eventual coding on three broad levels conjointly: 1) lexical, 2) morphological, and 3) syntactic. 6. The lexical material is culled from the actual translated text. The decision items within a given context are identified. The contextual cue or cues to the choice decision are indicated. 7. In addition to establishing solutions for lexical multivalence, procedures are being developed to handle problems in morphology and syntax as they arise in the material. At this stage in the research only preliminary formulations exist. 8. In carding the lexical and grammatical data, an attempt is made to symbolize the categorization by a code as follows:The seminar will work as required by emerging experience with the assistance of consultants in the fields of coding techniques, computational techniques, symbolic logic, and mathematics.
Appendix:
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} | null | 820 | 0 | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null |
42b86f3b83f075155e3a16733126f9eaf68748c5 | 34116601 | null | The Requirements of Lexical Storage | "Lexical Search In recent studies of Machine Translation a good deal of attention has been paid to t(...TRUNCATED) | {
"name": [
"King, Gilbert W."
],
"affiliation": [
null
]
} | null | null | Research in Machine Translation | 1957-04-01 | 0 | 0 | null | "There are two ways to carry out computations on a machine. One is to construct the required result (...TRUNCATED) | null | null | null | null | "Main paper: \n : \n There are two ways to carry out computations on a machine. One is to construct (...TRUNCATED) | null | null | null | null | {"paperhash":[],"title":[],"abstract":[],"authors":[],"arxiv_id":[],"s2_corpus_id":[],"intents":[],"(...TRUNCATED) | null | 814 | 0 | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null |
826fb686f66a4416310bd5c35f049afb688c737c | 41645107 | null | Grouping and Dependency Theories | "Immediate-constituent analysis and dependency analysis (two theories of syntactic description) are (...TRUNCATED) | {
"name": [
"Hays, David G."
],
"affiliation": [
null
]
} | null | null | Proceedings of the National Symposium on Machine Translation | 1960-02-01 | 0 | 23 | null | "1 I am grateful to Jane Pyne, H. Hiž, A. Madansky, and T. W. Mullikin for their criticisms and sug(...TRUNCATED) | null | null | null | null | "Main paper: \n : \n 1 I am grateful to Jane Pyne, H. Hiž, A. Madansky, and T. W. Mullikin for thei(...TRUNCATED) | null | null | null | null | {"paperhash":[],"title":[],"abstract":[],"authors":[],"arxiv_id":[],"s2_corpus_id":[],"intents":[],"(...TRUNCATED) | null | 780 | 0.029487 | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null |
cfeffb24d9d90495ac75e028893e0768e601ef30 | 244077632 | null | Linguistic Research at the {RAND} Corporation | "This paper describes postediting rules for description of funclion in context, work on computationa(...TRUNCATED) | {
"name": [
"Hays, David G."
],
"affiliation": [
null
]
} | null | null | Proceedings of the National Symposium on Machine Translation | 1960-02-01 | 1 | 0 | null | "We are spending this winter in writing a major report. After nearly three years of research, and af(...TRUNCATED) | null | null | null | null | "Main paper: \n introduction: \n We are spending this winter in writing a major report. After nearly(...TRUNCATED) | null | null | null | null | {"paperhash":["edmundson|research_methodology_for_machine_translation"],"title":["Research methodolo(...TRUNCATED) | null | 780 | 0 | null | null | null | null | null | null | null | null |
End of preview. Expand
in Data Studio
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A dataset for citation count prediction only, based on the ACL-OCL dataset. Extended with updated citation counts, references and annotated research hypothesis.
OpenReview (Last Update: 1.1.2025)
A dataset for review score and citation count prediction, obtained by parsing OpenReview. Due to licensing the dataset comes in different formats:
Datasets without parsed pdfs of submissions (i.e. the fields introduction, background, methodology, experiments_results, conclusion, full_text are available)
- openreview-public: Contains full information on all OpenReview submissions that are accompanied with a CC BY 4.0 license.
Datasets without parsed pdfs of submissions (i.e. the fields introduction, background, methodology, experiments_results, conclusion, full_text are None)
- openreview-full: Contains all OpenReview submissions, splits generated based on publications dates.
- openreview-iclr: All ICLR submissions from the years 2018-2023 (training) and 2024 (validation and training).
- openreview-neurips: All NeurIPS submissions from the years 2021-2023 (training) and 2024 (validation and training).
All datasets without parsed pdfs of submissions can be completed by running code available here
To load any of the datasets, change dataset_name with the desired dataset and run:
from datasets import load_dataset
dataset_name = "openreview-full"
dataset = load_dataset("nhop/scientific-quality-score-prediction", dataset_name)
Citation
If you make use of this dataset, please cite:
@article{hopner2025automatic,
title={Automatic Evaluation Metrics for Artificially Generated Scientific Research},
author={H{\"o}pner, Niklas and Eshuijs, Leon and Alivanistos, Dimitrios and Zamprogno, Giacomo and Tiddi, Ilaria},
journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.05712},
year={2025}
}
Overview of Dataset columns
| Attribute | Type | Explanation |
|---|---|---|
| Basic Paper Info | ||
title |
str |
The title of the paper. |
authors |
list[Author] |
A list of authors of the paper. |
abstract |
str | None |
The abstract of the paper (optional). |
summary |
str | None |
A summary of the paper (optional). |
month_since_publication |
int | None |
Month passed since the publication date (optional) |
publication_date |
str | None |
The publication date of the paper (optional). |
field_of_study |
list[str] | None |
The field(s) of study the paper belongs to (optional). |
venue |
str | None |
The venue where the paper was published (optional). |
| ID's | ||
paperhash |
str |
A unique hash identifier for the paper. (last_name_first_author|title|venue) |
arxiv_id |
str | None |
The arXiv ID of the paper (optional). |
s2_corpus_id |
str | None |
The Semantic Scholar (S2) corpus ID of the paper (optional). |
| Semantic Scholar Metadata | ||
n_references |
int | None |
The number of references in the paper (optional). |
n_citations |
int | None |
The number of citations the paper has received, only accepted papers (optional). |
n_influential_citations |
int | None |
The number of influential citations the paper has received, only accepted papers (optional). |
external_ids |
dict | None |
External IDs associated with the paper (optional). |
| Content | ||
introduction |
str | None |
Introduction of the paper if available (optional) |
background |
str | None |
Background of the paper if available (optional) |
methodology |
str | None |
Methodology of the paper if available (optional) |
experiments_results |
str | None |
Experiments & Results of the paper if available (optional) |
conclusion |
str | None |
Conclusion of the paper if available (optional) |
full_text |
str | None |
Full text of the paper if available (optional) |
| Review Data | ||
decision |
bool | None |
The decision on the paper (e.g., accepted/rejected) (optional). |
decision_text |
str | None |
The text explaining the decision (optional). |
reviews |
list[Review] | None |
A list of reviews for the paper (optional). |
comments |
list[Comment] | None |
A list of comments on the paper (optional). |
| Scores | ||
mean_score |
float | None |
The mean overall score of the reviews (optional) |
mean_novelty |
float | None |
The mean novelty score of the reviews (optional) |
mean_confidence |
float | None |
The mean confidence score of the reviews (optional) |
mean_correctness |
float | None |
The mean correctness score of the reviews (optional) |
mean_clarity |
float | None |
The mean clarity score of the reviews (optional) |
mean_impact |
float | None |
The mean impact score of the reviews (optional) |
mean_reproducibility |
float | None |
The mean reproducibility score of the reviews (optional) |
avg_citations_per_month |
float | None |
The average number of citations per month |
| References | ||
references |
list[Reference] | None |
A list of references cited in the paper (optional). |
| Hypothesis | ||
hypothesis |
str | None |
The hypothesis proposed in the paper annotated via an LLM (optional). |
The attributes of Author, Review, Comment, Reference are the following:
Review
| Attribute | Type | Explanation |
|---|---|---|
review_id |
str |
A unique identifier for the review. |
review |
TextReview |
The content of the review, represented by the TextReview model. |
score |
float | None |
The overall score given by the reviewer (optional). |
confidence |
float | None |
The reviewer's confidence in their assessment (optional). |
novelty |
float | None |
The novelty score of the paper (optional). |
correctness |
float | None |
The correctness score of the paper (optional). |
clarity |
float | None |
The clarity score of the paper (optional). |
impact |
float | None |
The impact score of the paper (optional). |
reproducibility |
float | None |
The reproducibility score of the paper (optional). |
ethics |
str | None |
Ethical considerations noted by the reviewer (optional). |
TextReview
| Attribute | Type | Explanation |
|---|---|---|
title |
str | None |
The title of the review (optional). |
paper_summary |
str | None |
A summary of the paper being reviewed (optional). |
main_review |
str | None |
The main content of the review (optional). |
strength_weakness |
str | None |
A section discussing the strengths and weaknesses of the paper (optional). |
questions |
str | None |
Questions raised by the reviewer (optional). |
limitations |
str | None |
Limitations of the paper as noted by the reviewer (optional). |
review_summary |
str | None |
A summary of the review (optional). |
Comment
| Attribute | Type | Explanation |
|---|---|---|
title |
str | None |
The title of the comment (optional). |
comment |
str |
The content of the comment. |
Reference
| Attribute | Type | Explanation |
|---|---|---|
| Basic Paper Info | ||
title |
str |
The title of the referenced paper. |
abstract |
str |
The abstract of the referenced paper (default is an empty string). |
authors |
list[str] |
A list of authors of the referenced paper. |
| IDs | ||
paperhash |
str |
Paperhash for the reference paper (first_author_last_name|title) |
arxiv_id |
str | None |
The arXiv ID of the referenced paper (optional, default is an empty string). |
s2_corpus_id |
str | None |
The Semantic Scholar (S2) corpus ID of the referenced paper (optional, default is an empty string). |
| Reference Specific Info | ||
intents |
list[str] | None |
The intents or purposes of the reference (optional). |
isInfluential |
bool | None |
Indicates whether the reference is influential (optional). |
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