nirenburg%umass-cs.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa (09/25/84)
From: Sergei Nirenburg <nirenburg%umass-cs.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa> Re: using a natural language as an interlingua in a machine translation system A natural language and an MT interlingua have different purposes and are designed differently. An interlingua should be ambiguity-free and should facilitate automatic reasoning about the knowledge encoded in it. A natural language is designed to be used by truly intelligent speakers and hearers, so that a lot of polysemy, homonymy, anaphoric phenomena, even outright errors can be put up with -- because the understander is so sophisticated. Brevity is at a premium in natural language communication, not clarity. The most recent attempt to use a language designed for humans as an MT interlingua is the Dutch researcher A. Witkam's attempt in his DLT machine translation project. He plans to use Binary-Coded Esperanto (BCE) as the interlingua in a planned multilingual MT system. An analysis of the approach shows that in reality the system involves two complete (transfer-based) translation modules: 1) Source language to BCE; and 2) BCE to Target language. Of many points of criticism possible let me mention just that this approach (in effect, double transfer) has nothing to do with AI methods. If transfer is used, it is not clear why an interlingua should be involved at all. For some more discussion see Tucker and Nirenburg, "Machine Translation: A Contemporary View", in the 1984 issue of the Annual Review of Information Science and Technology. At the same time, it would be nice to see a technical discussion of the system by Guzman de Rojas -- is any such thing available? Sergei
briggs@RIACS.ARPA (09/26/84)
From: Rick Briggs <briggs@RIACS.ARPA>
Sergia Nirenburg's statement that "a natural language and an
MT interlingua have different purposes and are designed differently"
is false and reveals an incorrect premise underlying much linguistic and
AI research. There is a natural language which was spoken between
1000 B.C. and 1900 A.D. which was used amongst a scientific community,
and which was ambiguity free(in some senses syntax-free) and which
fascilitated automatic inference. Instead of saying "John gave Mary
a book" these scientists would say "there was a giving event, having as
agent John, who is qualified by singularity...etc".
I have shown this well-developed system to be equivalent to
certain semantic net systems, and in some cases the ancient language
is even more specific.
The language is an obscure branch of Indo-Iranian of which there
are no translations, but the originals are extant.
Natural languages CAN serve as interlingua.
Rick Briggs
briggs@riacs