Transfer through quasi logical form - A new approach to machine translation

This Document is an introduction to a research project aimed at producing a prototype system for on-line translation of typed dialogues between speakers of different natural languages. The work was carried out jointly by SICS and SRI Cambridge. The resulting prototype system (called Billingual Conversation Interpreter, or BCI) translates between English and Swedish in both Directions. The major components of the BCI are two copies of the SRI Core Language Engine, equipped with English and Swedish grammars respectively. These are linked by the transfer and disambiguation components. Translation takes place by analyzing the source-language sentence into Quasi Logical Form (QLF), a linguistically motivated logical representation, transferring this onto a target-language QLF, and generating a target-language sentence. We believe that the project was successful in demonstrating the feasibility of using these techniques for interactive translation applications, and provides a sound basis for development of a large scale message translator system. The final section of the paper points to several possible follow-on projects aimed in the direction of practically usable commercial systems

Recycling Lingware in a Multilingual MT System

We describe two methods relevant to multi-lingual machine translation systems, which can be used to port linguistic data (grammars, lexicons and transfer rules) between systems used for processing related languages. The methods are fully implemented within the Spoken Language Translator system, and were used to create versions of the system for two new language pairs using only a month of expert effort.Comment: 6 pages, needs aclap.sty. To appear in "From Research to Commercial Applications" workshop at ACL-97, see also http://www.cam.sri.co

A spin dynamics approach to solitonics

It is spatial dispersion which is exclusively responsible for the emergence of exchange interaction and magnetic ordering. In contrast, magneto-crystalline anisotropy present in any realistic material brings in a certain non-linearity to the equation of motion. Unlike homogeneous ferromagnetic ordering a variety of non-collinear ground state configurations emerge as a result of competition among exchange, anisotropy, and dipole-dipole interaction. These particle-like states, e.g. magnetic soliton, skyrmion, domain wall, form a spatially localised clot of magnetic energy. In this paper we explore topologically protected magnetic solitons that might potentially be applied for logical operations and/or information storage in the rapidly advancing filed of solitonics (and skyrmionics). An ability to easily create, address, and manipulate such structures is among the prerequisite forming a basis of -onics technology, and is investigated in detail here using numerical and analytical tools

Estimating Performance of Pipelined Spoken Language Translation Systems

Most spoken language translation systems developed to date rely on a pipelined architecture, in which the main stages are speech recognition, linguistic analysis, transfer, generation and speech synthesis. When making projections of error rates for systems of this kind, it is natural to assume that the error rates for the individual components are independent, making the system accuracy the product of the component accuracies. The paper reports experiments carried out using the SRI-SICS-Telia Research Spoken Language Translator and a 1000-utterance sample of unseen data. The results suggest that the naive performance model leads to serious overestimates of system error rates, since there are in fact strong dependencies between the components. Predicting the system error rate on the independence assumption by simple multiplication resulted in a 16\% proportional overestimate for all utterances, and a 19\% overestimate when only utterances of length 1-10 words were considered.Comment: 10 pages, Latex source. To appear in Proc. ICSLP '9

Bilingual conversation interpreter : a prototype interactive message translator. Final report

This document is the final report for a research project aimed at producing a prototype system for on-line translation of typed dialogues between speakers of different natural languages. The work was carried out jointly by SICS and SRI Cambridge. The resulting prototype system (called Billingual Conversation Interpreter, or BCI) translates between english and Swedish in both directions.The Major components of the BCI are two copies of the SRI Core Language Engine, equipped with English and Swedish grammars respectively. These are linked by the transfer and disambiguation components. Translation takes place by analyzing the source-language sentence into Quasi Logical Form ( QLF), a linguistically motivated logical representation, transferring this into a target-language QLF, and generating a target-language sentence. When ambiguities occur that cannot be resolved automatically, they are clarified by Querying the appropriate user. The clarification dialogue presupposes no knowledge of either linguistics or the other language. The prototype system has a broad grammatical coverage, a initial vocabulary of about 1000 words together with vocabulary expansion tools, and a set of English-Swedish transfer rules. The formalism developed for coding this linguistic information make it relatively easy to extend the system. We believe that the project was successful in demonstrating the feasibility of using these techniques for interactive translation applications, and provides a sound basis for development of a large scale message translator system with potential for commercial exploitation.The main sections of this report are the following: * A non-technical introduction, summarizing the BCI's design , and containing a sample session. * An overview of the Swedish version of the CLE. * A detailed discussion of the theory and practice of QLF transfer. * A description of the interactive disambiguation method. * Suggestions for possible follow-on projects aimed in the direction of practically usable commercial systems

HoCHC: A Refutationally Complete and Semantically Invariant System of Higher-order Logic Modulo Theories

We present a simple resolution proof system for higher-order constrained Horn clauses (HoCHC) - a system of higher-order logic modulo theories - and prove its soundness and refutational completeness w.r.t. the standard semantics. As corollaries, we obtain the compactness theorem and semi-decidability of HoCHC for semi-decidable background theories, and we prove that HoCHC satisfies a canonical model property. Moreover a variant of the well-known translation from higher-order to 1st-order logic is shown to be sound and complete for HoCHC in standard semantics. We illustrate how to transfer decidability results for (fragments of) 1st-order logic modulo theories to our higher-order setting, using as example the Bernays-Schonfinkel-Ramsey fragment of HoCHC modulo a restricted form of Linear Integer Arithmetic

The development of translation theories in Europe

Este artigo trata do desenvolvimento dos estudos da tradução na Europa, no siculo XX. O maior enfoque está na mudança da perspeciiva de pesquisa, da comparação entre línguas para a confrontação de textos e da focalização datradução como atividade pragmática para a investigação do pensamento do tradutor (perspectiva cognitiva). Paralelamente à discussão dos conceitos teóricos, comenta-se também o desenvolvimento institucional dos estudos da tradução.Der vorliegende Aufsatz behandelt die Entwicklung der europäischen Übersetzungswissenschaft im 20. Jahrhundert. Der Schwerpunkt liegt auf dem Wandel der Forschungsperspektive vom Vergleich einzelner Sprachen hin zur Gegenüberstellung von Texten und von der Betonung des Handlungscharakters der Übersetzung hin zur Untersuchung des übersetzerischen Denkens (kognitive Perspektive). Parallel zur Diskussion theoretischer Konzepte, ist auch die institutionelle Entwicklung der Übersetzungswissenschaft Gegenstand der Untersuchung