Báo cáo khoa học: THE FIRST CONFERENCE ON MECHANICAL TRANSLATION

THE FOLLOWING is a report on the proceedings of the first , held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Mass., June 17-20, 1952, and my own reactions.1 At the Conference individuals working on MT in this country and in England met for the first time and presented their different approaches.
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Báo cáo khoa học: "THE FIRST CONFERENCE ON MECHANICAL TRANSLATION" THE FIRST CONFERENCE ON MECHANICAL TRANSLATION Erwin Reifler Department of Far Eastern and Slavic Languages and Literature University of Washington, Seattle, Wash. THE FOLLOWING is a report on the proceed- be very much indebted to him. ings of the first MT Conference, held at the The Conference decided that the papers of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cam- participants should be published together with the discussions.3 bridge, Mass., June 17-20, 1952, and my own r eactions.1 At the Conference individuals working on MT Automatic Dictionaryin this country and in England met for the first Of greatest interest to the Conference was Dr.t ime and presented their different approaches. Booths report on the translation experimentsA d etailed list of participants appears on the he and Dr. R, H. Richens had programmed on anext page. The important point is that at this computer in London. Dr. Warren Weaver hadConference linguists and electronic engineers previously, in his first memorandum on MTjoined for the first time to survey the linguistic (July 15, 1949), referred to their work. Ac-and engineering problems presented by MT. At c ording to him their interest was, at least atthe end of the Conference it was the general im- that time, confined to the problem of the mech-p ression of the participants that, for certain anization of a dictionary which in a reasonablytypes of source material, a mechanization of efficient way would handle all forms of allt he translation process is now a distinct possi- words. In a longer paper, SOME METHODSbility. Thus Dr. Warren Weavers ideas about OF MECHANIZED TRANSLATION, which Dr.the possibility of MT in our time ceased to be a Booth submitted to the Conference he and Dr.d ream and moved into the realm of reality. Richens explain their approach. The transla- A s a matter of fact, the engineers envisaged tion they envisage is a word-for-word transla-the creation of pilot machines within the next tion maintaining the word order of the inputf ew years; that is, machines with limited stor- text and, in the case of multiple meanings, sup-age for the translation of a limited quantity of plying alternative English equivalents. Thescientific material from a foreign language into machine determines by itself the stems andintelligible English, built for the purpose of endings of the words of the input text and com-convincing the general public and, especially, p ares them with the entries in its separatefoundations and other organizations able to sup- stem and ending memories. These furnish notport new ventures, of the feasibility of MT, in only the (often multiple) English equivalents foro rder to obtain the funds necessary for further the input words, but also the (sometimes mul-r esearch and improvements. tiple) grammatical meanings involved. The The Conference was ably organized by Dr. Y. latter are indicated in the output of the machineBar-Hillel of the Research Laboratory of Elec- b y abbreviations of the terms for the gramma-t ronics at M.I.T. Half ...