tailieunhanh - 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. | Mechanical Translation November 1956 pp. 44-45 Mechanical Translation Research at MIT f Victor H. Yngve. Massachusetts Institute of Technology Cambridge Massachusetts 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. Compared to this second conference the first one was small. We have contributions from over thirty people at this conference compared to thirteen four years ago striking evidence of how fast the field is growing. Bar-Hillel was interested in syntactic questions and was one of the foremost early exponents of the point of view that a machine would have to handle syntactic problems in order to provide adequate translations. Much of the work at MIT has continued from this point of view. The rather considerable difference in word order between German and English sentences indicates that a translation on a word-for-word basis without word order change would not be desirable. Word order change from German to English at least often turns out to be phrase order change. For example the order of adverbial expressions phrases of time and place frequently has to be reversed or they have to be placed differently with respect to various objects or prepositional phrases. Routines for making such word order changes would seem to require some mechanical procedure for separating the sentence into phrases and clauses and identifying each of them as to kind or type. In other words a machine routine for changing word order from German to English could be based on a routine for recognizing German sentence structure. Besides word order changes the correct meanings of the words must be selected. Many suggestions have been proposed for choosing among the various possible meanings of words. The method that we are exploring in detail promises to solve some of the .