Re: Automated translation

At 11:22 pm -0500 12/3/99, Carlos Thompson wrote:
>Herman Miller wrote:
>
>> Does anyone here have any familiarity with writing software to do automated
>> translation of languages?
>
>[...]
>
>> . Has anyone done any
>> experimentation in this area, either with their conlangs or natlangs?
The dissertation for my master's degree in computing was concerned with
just this.  As part of it I did produce an automatic translator, written in
Prolog, which translated a subset of German into English.

The English was always readable in the way that some automatic translators
are not - but would need 'touching up' to produce 100% natural English;
e.g. the preterite was simply translated 'did' + infin.  It was then up to
the English editor to get the best English past tense for the context.

>I'm suposed to be working in a project on automatic translation... well, the
>project includes speech recognition, automated translation and sign synthesis.
>(I'm focused on the translation part.)
Wow!!  Now speech recognition does have problems.  It'll be interesting to
know how the project gets on.

>
>An small summary of what we have found: there is not yet a perfect translating
>machine.
Too right - and some are pretty hopeless.  Not so long ago I found an
interesting web-site in French and clicked the button for 'translation' to
English when I printed it.   Oh dear - the result was almost gibberish.  I
reprinted the French - it was far more intelligible.

>There are some heuristics models and one interesting I heared about
>is a big AI machine (probably a neural machine), feed it with the phrases in
>the source language, feed it with translations in the destination
>language, and
>let the machine find patterns.  Then it could translate any phrase... the
>problem is the amout of phrases you have to feed the machine with.
Sounds interesting - do you know how successful the system is?

>There is the modular alternative we are following: 1. try to understand
>what is
>said in the source language; 2. translate the structures and the
>vocabulary; 3.
>generate the correct forms in the destination language.
>
>For understanding what is said, there is a morphological analysis and a
>syntactic analysis.  Then you have a tree with all the analisys of each
>sentence.  Finnaly you have to take ambiguity away, and there is no real
>method... if "I saw the wood yesterday", you have the clues: yesterday -> past
>-> saw = see_past... but this is the most difficoult part and you say is not
>your intention to come that close.
Yep - that's precisely the way I went about things on my small model.

>Those trees can be converted, some branches moved (the past decletion in a
>verb
>would become a particle and the definite article would become a shift in the
>order of the sentense, and the noun phrase before the verb would be given a
>nominative ending... et cetera).
>
>Once you have the tree you would generate, first syntacticaly, then
>morphologically, and you have translated.
Yep - that's about it.  Moving those branches around is quite challenging
and, at least for me, interesting.

........
>
>The kind of output makes me thing, that the best way of manipulating the trees
>are languages like LISP (but I had no echo at work... probably because nobody
>in the group, including me, knew anything on Lisp).
Yes, for those who know & have access to LISP.  Personally, it's a language
I never took to.  Prolog is also very good at manipulating trees.
........
>
>Well, it seems not to be imposible.
Certainly, more pedestrian language is probably susceptible to some sort of
satisfactory automated translation, but poetry??   Who knows  :)

It's a fascinating area of research and if it weren't for that awkwark
business of having to earn a living, I'd like to get back in there again.
My advice to Herman is to go for it and try it.

Ray.