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From: nirenburg%umass-cs.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa
Newsgroups: net.ai
Subject: natural languages as interlinguas for MT
Message-ID: <12383@sri-arpa.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 24-Sep-84 23:28:00 EDT
Article-I.D.: sri-arpa.12383
Posted: Mon Sep 24 23:28:00 1984
Date-Received: Sat, 29-Sep-84 09:24:34 EDT
Lines: 36

From:  Sergei Nirenburg 


Re: using a natural language as an interlingua in a machine translation
system

A natural language and an MT interlingua have different purposes and are
designed differently.  An interlingua should be ambiguity-free and should
facilitate automatic reasoning about the knowledge encoded in it.  A natural
language is designed to be used by truly intelligent speakers and hearers, so
that a lot of polysemy, homonymy, anaphoric phenomena, even outright errors
can be put up with -- because the understander is so sophisticated.  Brevity
is at a premium in natural language communication, not clarity.

The most recent attempt to use a language designed for humans as an MT
interlingua is the Dutch researcher A. Witkam's attempt in his DLT machine
translation project.  He plans to use Binary-Coded Esperanto (BCE) as the
interlingua in a planned multilingual MT system.

An analysis of the approach shows that in reality the system involves two
complete (transfer-based) translation modules: 1) Source language to BCE; and
2) BCE to Target language.

Of many points of criticism possible let me mention just that this
approach (in effect, double transfer)  has nothing to do with AI methods.
If transfer is used, it is not clear why an interlingua should be involved at
all.

For some more discussion see Tucker and Nirenburg, "Machine Translation: A
Contemporary View", in the 1984 issue of the Annual Review of Information
Science and Technology.

At the same time, it would be nice to see a technical discussion of the
system by Guzman de Rojas -- is any such thing available?

Sergei