Machine Translation I.ppt

Machine Translation I John Hutchins “Machine translation: general overview”. Chapter 27 of R Mitkov (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Computational Linguistics, Oxford (2004): OUP Harold Somers “Machine Translation”. Chapter 13 of R Dale, H Moisl H Somers (eds) Handbook of Natural Language Processing, New York (2000): Marcel Dekker Machine Translation Brief history Why is translation hard for a computer? How does it work? Modes of use Latest research 1. Brief history war-time use of computers in code breaking Warren Weaver’s memorandum 1949 Big investment by US Government (mostly on Russian-English) Early promise of FAHQT Fully automatic high quality translation 1955-1966 1966-1985 Research confined to Europe and Canada “2nd generation approach”: linguistically and computationally more sophisticated c. 1976: success of Météo (Canada) 1978: CEC starts discussions of its own MT project, Eurotra first commercial systems early 1980s FAHQT abandoned in favour of “Translator’s Workstation” interactive systems sublanguage / controlled input 1985-2000 Lots of research in Europe and Japan in this “linguistic” paradigm PC replaces mainframe computers more systems marketed despite low quality, users claim increased productivity general explosion in translation market thanks to international organizations, globalisation of marketplace (“buy in your language, sell in mine”) renewed funding in US (work on Farsi, Pashto, Arabic, Korean; include speech translation) emergence of new research paradigm (“empirical” methods; allows rapoid development of new target language) growth of WWW, including translation tools Present situation creditable commercial systems now available wide price range, many very cheap (￡30) MT available free on WWW widely used for weband e-mail translation low-quality output acceptable for reading foreign-language web pages but still only a small set of languages covered speech translation widely researched 2. Why is translation hard (for the computer) ? Two/