Recent developments in machine translation

Abstract

This paper describes developments in the area of machine translation (MT). First, the paper gives an overview of developments in Germany in general; then, special problems are discussed. The system taken as an example is METAL (Machine Translation and Analysis of Natural Language), where recent development work has centered around two main topics. (i) Efforts have been made to make the system really multilingual. The German-to-English prototype had to be expanded, some system components had to be readjusted, and additional problems had to be solved. Currently, analysis and synthesis components for German, English, French, Spanish, and Dutch are under development. All these languages use a common system kernel and a standard interface structure. (ii) The system had to be made user-friendly. This was an even more important task as, up to now, MT systems have not been well accepted by users. METAL tries to be more realistic, and also tries to support the main user interfaces in a much better way than has been done before. This is based on the conviction that there are several parameters which determine the real success of an MT system. It is not just translation quality which is decisive, it is also the integration of an MT system into the whole process of preparing and translating documents. The first serious work on Machine TranslationGregor Thurmair is head of the Linguistics Department at Siemens Nixdorf lnformation Systems and project leader of the machine translation group, METAL. He is involved in projects in information retrieval (morphological analysis), speech understanding (parsing, semantics) and machine translation (METAL system). He has presented papers on morphology, semantics in speech understanding, transfer problems in MT, and grammar checking. 25:115--128, 1991. © 1991 KluwerAcademic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands. (MT) in Germany was carried out in the seventies. There had been several natural language projects before but most of them concentrated on other topics like information retrieval or database query systems. In Saarbriicken, there was a governmentsponsored project which tried to set up machinereadable dictionaries containing linguistic information. Around this dictionary, several linguistic analysis components were built, such as lemmatization, syntactic constituent analysis, and syntactic analysis. Again, the first application was information retrieval but soon it was found that this software could be used as a basis for MT as well. This resulted in the first prototype of SUSY in 1981. Computers and the Humanities Projects in SaarbriickenThe system structure of the first version of SUSY was very similar to other systems at that time. Words were lemmatized, and an attempt was made to resolve homographs. Then, syntactic constituents were built and, finally, trees were constructed out of these constituents. Such techniques have the drawback that irreversible decisions must be made at an early stage (e.g. in the homograph resolution) without having the knowledge gained in the late...