A bootstrap approach to automatically generating lexical transfer rules

MT Summit VII Sept. 1999 Retrospect and prospect in computer-based translation John Hutchins (University of East Anglia, Norwich UK) [Email: WJHutchins@compuserve.com] Abstract At the last MT Summit conference this century, this paper looks back briefly at what has happened in the 50 years since MT began, reviews the present situation, and speculates on what the future may bring. Progress in the basic processes of computerized translation has not been as dramatic as developments in computer technology and software. There is still much scope for the improvement of the linguistic quality of MT output, which hopefully developments in both rule-based and corpus-based methods can bring. Greater impact on the future MT scenario will probably come from the expected huge increase in demand for on-line real-time communication in many languages, where quality may be less important than accessibility and usability. 1 MT: the first 40 years, 1949-1989 Just fifty years ago, Warren Weaver wrote his famous memorandum that was to launch research on machine translation (Weaver 1949/1955), initially primarily in the United States but before the end of the 1950s throughout the world. (This had not been the first mention of machine translation (MT): Weaver had written about it to Norbert Wiener in March 1947, and Andrew Booth and Richard Richens had done some tentative experiments in 1948 - for details see Hutchins 1997). In those early days, and for many years afterwards, computers were quite different from those we are familiar with today. They were large very expensive machines housed in large rooms with reinforced flooring and ventilation systems to reduce excess heat. They required a small army of maintenance engineers and a dedicated staff of operators and programmers. Most of the work was mathematical in nature, either directly for military institutions or for university departments of physics and applied mathematics with strong links to the armed forces. It was perhaps natural in these circumstances that much of the earliest work on machine translation was supported by military or intelligence funds directly or indirectly, and was intended for use by such organizations – hence the emphasis in the United States on Russian-to-English translation, and in the Soviet Union on English-to- Russian translation. Although MT attracted a great deal of funding in the 1950s and 1960s, particularly when the arms and space races began in earnest after the launch of the first sputnik in 1957, and the first space flight by Gagarin in 1961. the results of this period of activity were disappointing. As the MT community know well, research suffered a major blow with the publication of the ALPAC report (ALPAC 1966) which concluded that the United States had no need of MT even if the prospect of reasonable translations were realistic – which then seemed unlikely. The authors of the report had compared unfavourably the quality of the output produced by current systems with the artificially high quality of the first public demonstration of MT in 1954 – the very limited Russian- English program developed jointly by IBM and Georgetown …

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