Báo cáo khoa học: Mechanical Translation Research at MIT

WORK IN THE FIELD of mechanical translation started at MIT in 1951 when Y. Bar-Hillel became perhaps the first full-time worker in the field. In 1952, he organized the first international conference on mechanical translation. It, too, took place at MIT.
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Báo cáo khoa học: "Mechanical Translation Research at MIT" [Mechanical Translation, vol.3, no.2, November 1956; pp. 44-45]M echanical Translation Research at MIT †Victor H. Yngve. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts with sentence structure. These very difficultWORK IN THE FIELD of mechanical translation multiple-meaning problems can be resolved bystarted at MIT in 1951 when Y. Bar-Hillel be- machine routines based on the same sentencecame perhaps the first full-time worker in the structure analysis that the machine would makefield. In 1952, he organized the first interna- in order to initiate the word order changes.tional conference on mechanical translation. It, Examples of the sort of choices of meaningtoo, took place at MIT. Compared to this se- that could be made on the basis of sentencecond conference, the first one was small. We structure are not at all hard to find. Take, forhave contributions from over thirty people at example,the word der. Various meaningsthis conference compared to thirteen four years a rethe, of the, who, that, which, he,ago — striking evidence of how fast the field is it. If the sentence structure is known, thengrowing. it is known whether der is an article, rela- B ar-Hillel was interested in syntactic tive pronoun, etc., and many, if not all, of thequestions and was one of the foremost early ex- incorrect meanings can be eliminated. Eachponents of the point of view that a machine would of the other parts of speech offers many morehave to handle syntactic problems in order to examples.provide adequate translations. Much of the An alternative to the use of rules based onwork at MIT has continued from this point of sentence structure is the use of what may beview. The rather considerable difference in called ad hoc rules. For example, if derword order between German and English sen- follows a word that is capitalized without antences indicates that a translation on a word- intervening comma, the translation of the willfor-word basis without word order change would be right about 95 per cent of the time. But itnot be desirable. will be wrong in those very cases in which the Word order change, from German to English ad hoc rule does not correspond to the facts ofa t least, often turns out to be phrase order sentence structure. The difficulty with ad hocchange. For example, the order of adverbial rules does not end with this 5-per-cent error;expressions (phrases) of time and place fre- many times it is virtually impossible to findquently has to be reversed, or they have to be any satisfactory ad hoc rule for a situationplaced differently with respect to various ob- that is quite clear on a structural basis.jects or prepositional phrases. Routines for In the course of our work, one thing hasmaking such word order changes would seem become very clear. If the machine is to recog-to require some mechanical procedure for se- nize the sentence structure, we must have aparating the sentence into phrases and clauses descriptio ...