ULTRA: A Multi-lingual Machine Translator

[MT Summit III, Washington, DC, USA, July 1991] ULTRA: A Multilingual Machine Translator David Farwell and Yorick Wilks Computing Research Laboratory New Mexico State University Box 30001, Las Cruces, NM 88003 Abstract ULTRA (Universal Language TRAnslator) is a mul- tilingual, interlingual machine translation system currently under development at the Computing Re- search Laboratory at New Mexico State University. It translates between five languages (Chinese, En- glish, German, Japanese, Spanish) with vocabular- ies in each language based on approximately 10,000 word senses. The major design criteria are that the system be robust and general purpose with simple to use utilities for customization to suit the needs of particular users. This paper describes the central characteristics of the system: the intermediate representation, the language components, semantic and pragmatic pro- cesses, and supporting lexical entry tools. 1 Introduction ULTRA (Universal Language TRAnslator) is a mul- tilingual, interlingual machine translation system under development at the Computing Research Lab- oratory at New Mexico State University. It cur- rently translates between five languages (Chinese, English, German, Japanese, Spanish) with vocabu- laries in each language based on about 10,000 word senses. The major design criteria are that the sys- tem be robust and general purpose with simple to use utilities for customization to suit the needs of particular users. Its special features include: • a multilingual system with a language- independent (interlingual) system for repre- senting expressions as elements of linguistic acts; • bidirectional, Prolog grammars for each lan- guage incorporating semantic and pragmatic constraints; • use of relaxation techniques to provide robust- ness by giving preferred or "near miss" trans- lations; • language-independent semantic and pragmatic procedures for disambiguation and interpreting elipted information; • access to large machine dictionaries for rapid up-scaling of size and coverage. 2 The system of intermediate representation The interlingual representation (IR) has been de- signed to reflect our assumption that what is univer- sal about language is that it is used to perform acts of communication: asking questions, describing the world, expressing one's thoughts, getting people to do things, warning them not to do things, promis- ing that things will get done and so on. Transla- tion, then, can be viewed as the use of the target language to perform the same act as that which was performed using the source language. The IR serves as the basis for analyzing or for generating expres- sions as elements of such acts in each of the lan- guages in the translation system. The representation has been formulated on the basis of an on-going cross-linguistic comparative analysis of hand-generated translations with respect to the kinds of information necessary for selecting the appropriate forms of equivalent expressions in the different languages in the system. We have 19 looked at a number of different types of commu- nication including expository texts, business letters, e-mail messages and dialogues. This, coupled with the fact that the languages selected for the initial development stage are of different historical and ty- pological background, has led to a solid foundation for …

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