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Machine Translation

Yorick Wilks

Machine Translation

Its Scope and Limits

123

Yorick Wilks

Department of Computer Science

The University of Shefﬁeld

Regent Court, 211 Portobello Street

Shefﬁeld, S1 4DP, UK

Y.Wilks@dcs.shef.ac.uk

ISBN: 978-0-387-72773-8

e-ISBN: 978-0-387-72774-5

Library of Congress Control Number: 2008931409

Springer Science+Business Media LLC 2009

permission of the publisher (Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, 233 Spring Street, New York,

NY 10013, USA), except for brief excerpts in connection with reviews or scholarly analysis. Use in

connection with any form of information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software,

or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed is forbidden.

The use in this publication of trade names, trademarks, service marks, and similar terms, even if they are

not identiﬁed as such, is not to be taken as an expression of opinion as to whether or not they are subject to

proprietary rights.

Printed on acid-free paper

springer.com

Foreword

This book is a set of essays covering aspects of machine translation (MT) past,

present and future. Some have been published before, some are new but, taken

together, they are meant to present a coherent account of the state of MT, its evolu-

tion up to the present, and its scope for the future. At certain points, “Afterwords”

have been added to comment on the, possibly changed, relevance of a chapter at the

time of publication.

The argument for reprinting here some older thoughts on MT is an attempt to

show some continuity of one researcher’s thoughts, so far as possible, in the welter

of argument and dispute that has gone on over decades on how MT is to be done.

The book is certainly not intended as a comprehensive history of the ﬁeld, and these

already exist. Nor is any one MT system described or advocated here. The author

has been involved in the production of three quite different systems: a toy semantics-

based system at Stanford in 1971, whose code was placed in the Computer Museum

in Boston as the ﬁrst meaning-driven MT system. Later, in 1985, I was involved in

New Mexico in ULTRA, a multi-language system with strong semantic and prag-

matic features, intended to show that the architecture of the (failed) EUROTRA

system could perform better at 1% of what that cost. No comprehensive description

of EUROTRA is given here, and the history of that project remains to be written.

Lastly, in 1990, I was one of three PIs in the DARPA-funded system PANGLOSS,

a knowledge-based system set up in competition with IBM’s CANDIDE system,

that became the inspiration for much of the data-driven changes that have over-

taken language processing since 1990. None of these systems is being presented

here as a solution to MT, for nothing yet is, but only as a test-bed of ideas and

performance.

Machine translation is not, as some believe, solved, nor is it impossible, as

others still claim. It is a lively and important technology, whose importance in

a multi-lingual and information-driven world can only increase, intellectually and

commercially. Intellectually, it remains, as it always has been, the ultimate testbed

of all linguistic and language processing theories.

In writing this book, I am indebted to too many colleagues and students to

mention, though I must acknowledge joint work with David Farwell (chapters 10

Wilks, Yorick (2009) Machine Translation - Its Scope and Limits.pdf

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