An Evaluation of METAL: the LRC Machine Translation System

An Evaluation of METAL: the LRC Machine Translation System Jonathan Slocum Microelectronics and Co~uter Technology Corp. Winfield S. Bennett LesleyWhlffin EddaNorcross Siemens Co~mmmllcation Syst~-~q, Inc. AbstraCt The Linguistics Research Center (LRC) at the University of Texas at Austin is currently developing METAL, a fully-automatlc high quality machine translation system, for market introduction in 1985. This paper will describe the current stat~s of METAL, e~phasizing the results of the most recent post-edltors' evaluation, and will briefly indicate some future directions for the system. A 6-page German original tex~ and a raw (unedIt~3d, but automatically reformatted) METAL translation of that text into English are included as appendices. Introductlon The Linguistics Research Center (LRC) at the University of Texas at Austin is currently developing METAL, a fully-automatic high quality machine translation system, for market introduction in 1985. This paper wlll describe the curren~ statn/s o f METAL, including the results of the most recent evaluation, and will briefly indicate some fur%Ire directions for the system. Exhibits A and B (attached) are, respectively, a German original text and a raw (unedlted, but automatically reformatted) METAL translation of that into English. History and Status Machine translation research at the University of Texas began in 1956: the LRC was founded in 1961. Eor much o f the hi~cory of. this project, funding was provided by the U.S. Air Force's Rome Air Development Center and other U.S. gove~,m~nt agencies. In 1979, Siemens AG began funding the development phase of the METAL machine translation sy~cez, at which point i~lementatlon of the current system was initiated. A prototype has recently been delivered to the sponsor for market testing. The current system is a unidirectional German-English system, although work to add ot/%er target languages, as well as creating an English-German MT system, is now underway. The present staff for the METAL project consists of seven full-ti~e and five half-tlme personnel. Application Environment Software has been developed to handle the formatting problems associated with technical manuals. This software, written in SNOBOL, automatically marks and prepares texts for the METAL translation system [Slocum and Bennett, 1982; Slocum eu al. 0 1984]. The only human intervention prior to translation is checking and correcting the results o f t_he automatic formatting routines. Postediting is expected for the output t~. The system does not expect (or provide for) human intervention during the actual translation phase. Pre-processing and post-edlting are presantly done on a DEC-2060; the actual translation, on a Symbolics Lisp machine. The "proch/ction ~ " design envisions a Lisp Machine as the translation unit co, necked to 4-6 ~ranslator workstations, from which t,he prepared ~ will be sent to the translation unit and on which the output texts will be postedlted. METAL uses a transfer approach for translation. The entire process consists of four phases : analysis, integration, transfer, and generation (synthesis). The integration phase works with whole parse tree st-ruc~ures, following analysis and preceding transfer. Until recently, transfer and generation were essentially a single phase, but work is currently underway to separate this …

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