tailieunhanh - Báo cáo khoa học: "WHEN IS THE NEXT ALPAC REPORT DUE"

There were already proposals for autcmatic translation systems in the 30's, but it was not until after the second world war that real enthusiasm led to heavy funding and unrealistic expectations. Traditionally, the start of intensive work on machine translation is taken as being a memorand~n of Warren Weaver, then Director of the Natural Sciences Division of the Rockefeller Foundation, in 1949. | WHEN IS THE NEXT ALPAC REPORT DUE Margaret KING Dalle Molle Institute for Semantic and Cognitive Studies University of Geneva Switzerland Machine translation has a somewhat cheoquered history. There were already proposals for automatic translation systems in the 30 s but it was not until after the second world war that real enthusiasm led to heavy funding and unrealistic expectations. Traditionally the start of intensive work on machine translation is taken as being a memorandum of Warren Weaver then Director of the Natural Sciences Division of the Rockefeller Foundation in 1949. In this memorandum called Translation Weaver took stock of earlier work done by Booth and Richens. He likened the problem of machine translation to the problem of code breaking for which digital computers had been used with considerable success It is very tempting to say that a book written in Chinese is simply a book written in English which was coded into the Chinese code . If we have useful methods for solving almost any cryptographic problem may it not be that with proper interpretation we already have useful methods for translation Weaver 1949 . Weaver s memorandum led to a great deal of activity in research on machine translation and eventually to the first conference on the topic organised by Bar-Hillel in 1952. At this conference optimism reigned. Afterwards teams in a number of American universities pursued research along the general lines agreed at the conference to be fruitful. At Georgetown University . Dostert started up a machine translation project with the declared aim of building a pilot system to convince potential funding agencies of the feasibility and the practicability of machine translation. This led in 1954 to the famous Georgetown experiment a pilot system translating from Russian to English which was hailed as an unqualified success during the next ten years over 20 million dollars were invested in machine translation by various US government agencies. An idea