tailieunhanh - Báo cáo khoa học: "THE CONFERENCE ON MECHANICAL TRANSLATION"

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. | Mechanical Translation December 1954 pp. 47-55 THE CONFERENCE ON MECHANICAL TRANSLATION Held at . June 17-20 1952 A. C. Reynolds Jr. International Business Machines Corporation Endicott N. Y. 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. 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 .