MT System Research Articles

Machine translation: Linguistic characteristics of MT systems and general methodology of evaluation By John Lehrberger and Laurent Bourbeau (review)

Machine translation: Linguistic characteristics of MT systems and general methodology of evaluation By John Lehrberger and Laurent Bourbeau (review)

Ma?innyj perevod i prikladnaja lingvistika: Problemy sozdanija sistemy avtomati?eskogo perevoda

This work, the title of which means 'Machine Translation and Applied Linguistics: Problems in the Development of Automatic Translation Systems,' and which is published by the Pedagogical Institute for Foreign Languages in Moscow, is a collection of papers on the French-Russian MT project of the Center for Translation in Moscow. The project is known by its Russian acronym frap, for Francuzsko-Russkij Avtomatides/dj Perevod ('French-Russian Automatic Translation'). The volume is a fairly thorough discussion of theoretical and methodological issues related to this system which, until now, has been described in the literature in only very general terms. Eight papers in the volume discuss various aspects of FRAP. The introductory article by N.N. Leont'eva, Senior Research Supervisor of the project, describes the frap information processing and translation system and the need for a component in MT systems that allows for a transition to a different semantic domain during transfer. A paper by E.E. Lovtskij and L. Ju. Korostelev emphasizes the programming rather than the linguistic point of view in the initial analysis of the source language. E.G. Sokolova discusses formal syntactic representation in terms of functional grammar. Initial and final syntactic representations of a sentence are discussed, as are some questions of syntactic ambiguity. Three of the papers focus on semantics, and they are the most intriguing in this volume. I.M. KundrjaSova describes the semantic dictionary of the system and its role in semantic analysis. The semantic dictionary is also the subject of a short paper by A.E. GureviC, who discusses the computational semantics of parametric nouns. The third, by Leont'eva, KundrjaSova, and O.B. MaleviC, discusses sentence-bound semantic analysis and summarizes some experimental work in semantic interpretation of syntactic structures. The authors posit that the aggregation of semantic representations of the sentences in a text can be regarded

The Place of Semantics in MT Systems

The Place of Semantics in MT Systems

The potential of swetra—A multilanguage MT system

One may indicate the potentials of an MT system by stating what text genres it can process, e.g., weather reports and technical manuals. This approach is practical, but misleading, unless domain knowledge is highly integrated in the system. Another way to indicate which fragments of language the system can process is to state its grammatical potentials, or more formally, which languages the grammars of the system can generate. This approach is more technical and less understandable to the layman (customer), but it is less misleading, since it stresses the point that the fragments which can be translated by the grammars of a system need not necessarily coincide exactly with any particular genre. Generally, the syntactic and lexical rules of an MT system allow it to translate many sentences other than those belonging to a certain genre. On the other hand it probably cannot translate all the sentences of a particular genre. Swetra is a multilanguage MT system defined by the potentials of a formal grammar (standard referent grammar) and not by reference to a genre. Successful translation of sentences can be guaranteed if they are within a specified syntactic format based on a specified lexicon. The paper discusses the consequences of this approach (Grammatically Restricted Machine Translation, GRMT) and describes the limits set by a standard choice of grammatical rules for sentences and clauses, noun phrases, verb phrases, sentence adverbials, etc. Such rules have been set up for English, Swedish and Russian, mainly on the basis of familiarity (frequency) and computer efficiency, but restricting the grammar and making it suitable for several languages poses many problems for optimization. Sample texts — newspaper reports — illustrate the type of text that can be translated with reasonable success among Russian, English and Swedish.

The potential of Swetra — A multilanguage MT system

The potential of Swetra — A multilanguage MT system

Semantic analysis in XTRA, an English — Chinese machine translation system

This paper concerns the resolution of lexical ambiguity in a machine translation environment. We describe the integration of principles of selection restrictions. Preference Semantics, and intelligent relaxation of constraints in handling lexical ambiguity. The approach differs from many previous MT systems in that it is more powerful than ‘brute force’ systems, while more realistic than systems that assume a large degree of coded encyclopedia information for ‘full understanding.’

Eurotra: A European perspective on MT

This paper describes the perspective on Machine Translation taken in the Eurotra project: an R & D project of the European Communities at a relatively early stage. It describes: i) the project's rather challenging aims; ii) the framework of design principles and linguistic and software methodology which are of particular importance given its size, scope, and organization; iii) the proposed representational theories and expressive (programming) languages with which actual instances of MT systems can be constructed. The final section sketches some recent proposals and directions for future research.

Strong association of HLA-DR2 and MT1 with idiopathic membranous nephropathy in Japan

Fifty adult Japanese patients with biopsy-proven idiopathic membranous nephropathy (IMN) were typed for HLA-A, B, and DR antigens, and additional B cell alloantigens designated the MT system. The phenotype frequencies of HLA-DR2 (80.0 vs. 36.0%) and MT1 (96.0 vs. 49.5%) appeared to be significantly increased in the patient group when compared to those of a control. There were lower frequencies of DR4, DRw9, MT3, and MT4 in these particular patients. The decreases of MT3 and MT4 were statistically significant but those of DR4 and DRw9 were not. These results suggest that HLA-DR2 and MT1 antigens are related to the occurrence of IMN in the Japanese population.

Electrical Structure of Garhwal Himalayan region, India, inferred from Magnetotelluric

DOI = 10.3126/hjs.v5i7.1270 Himalayan Journal of Sciences Vol.5(7) (Special Issue) 2008 p.70-71