Re: Automated translation

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?
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.)

An small summary of what we have found: there is not yet a perfect translating
machine.  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.

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.

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.

For the analysis I've found two usefull programs at SIL.  PC Kimmo
(http://www.sil.org/pckimmo/) would help you with the morphologycal analysis...
and probably with the morphological sysntesis too (I have not yet test it this
way).  PC Patr II (http://www.sil.org/pcpatr/) would help you with the
sintactical analysis, and is based on PC Kimmo and therefor compatible.  What I
like on PC Kimmo is that is programable and I have used into some of my
conlangs... but not in big deep.

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).

I've I have understand correctly, Kimmo would also be usefull for the
synthesis.

Well, it seems not to be imposible.