Machine Translation Project
Currently available commercial machine translation (MT) systems do not meet the requirements of a group of potential MT users whose MT needs are not fixed. The military is a typical example, but various types of civilian users also fall into this group of "ad-hoc MT users" (international relief work, medical work, development work, financial sector, economic advisory work, and so on). The requirements of this group of potential MT users can be characterized as follows in operational terms:- Much of the translation needed by ad-hoc MT users is domain-specific, e.g., battle scenario message traffic, training manuals, medical diagnosis routines, intelligence reports and briefing slides, domain-specific newswire, and so on.
- Often, languages for which ad-hoc MT users need high-quality translation (such as Korean, Arabic, Serbo-Croatian, Ukranian, Somali, Haitian Creole, or Indonesian) are not viable languages for large-scale commercial development of MT.
- Moreover, specific MT needs for ad-hoc MT users — specific with respect to domain and/or language — can arise at very short notice in response to crises or opportunities, which can be in any spot in the world and can arise with no warning.
- Finally, unlike many corporate settings, MT must be available for many ad-hoc MT users on laptop PCs under rugged conditions.
- Available broad-coverage, acceptable-quality, cross-platform MT systems for certain key languages.
- Available domain-specific, high-quality, cross-platform MT systems for certain key domains and languages.
- The ability to quickly assemble cross-platform MT systems for new languages and/or new limited domains, exploiting existing (legacy) resources as much as possible and using advanced tools to create new resources where needed.
In Phase I, we developed a modular framework with a "plug-and-play" architecture for assembling MT systems from off-the-shelf components. The core of the system is a lexicalized, syntax-oriented transfer component. The definition of the level of transfer also provides the interface definition for other software components, such as parsers and generators. We used two different parsers from the University of Pennsylvania, and the RealPro generator from CoGenTex.
In Phase II, we will add to this framework resources and specific functionality not currently present, and improve currently available resources and functionality.
Two types of results will issue from the Phase II effort.
- We will produce an extensible plug-and-play translation framework which will come with trainable tools for transfer lexicon extraction, and a choice of parsers and a modifiable generation shell.
- We will produce an operational prototype MT system for high-quality translation in the battlefield message domain, as well as an operational prototype broad-coverage MT system for acceptable quality. Both systems will be for the language pairs Korean-to-English and English-to-Korean.
- Subcomponents of these two systems will include stand-alone English and Korean parsers and generators, as well as associated lexicons and the bilingual transfer lexicon.
- Good-quality broad coverage MT, by exploiting the newest natural language processing technology.
- High-quality domain-specific MT.
- Rapid development of new MT systems for new languages and/or domains.
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Papers