Báo cáo khoa học: "On the Problem of Mechanical Translation"

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HAVING STARTED WORK on mechanical translation, we arrived at the conclusion that both the lexical meaning and the morphological shape of the word can and should be utilized in analyzing the text, and that for purposes of translation it is impractical to omit the information which can be thus obtained. The utilization of the lexical meanings of words as well as of their contexts may also affect problems of coding. These questions are extremely important to automatic translation. We based our work on the following principles: 1. Maximum separation of the dictionary from the translation program. This enables us to...

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[Mechanical Translation, vol.3, no.2, November 1956; pp. 42-43] On the Problem of Mechanical Translation † D. Panov, The Academy of Sciences, Moscow, U.S.S.R. HAVING STARTED WORK on mechanical trans- computer), a dictionary of 952 English and lation, we arrived at the conclusion that both 1,073 Russian words was compiled. the lexical meaning and the morphological shape For a number of English words (121 words, of the word can and should be utilized in analy- in our case), the place-in-the-vocabulary indi- zing the text, and that for purposes of transla- cation is replaced by special digit indication to tion it is impractical to omit the information show that these words have multiple meaning. which can be thus obtained. The utilization of The proper Russian word is chosen in this case the lexical meanings of words as well as of by utilizing a special program of automatic their contexts may also affect problems of cod- translation, which we call "the Polysemantic ing. These questions are extremely important Dictionary". to automatic translation. If the spelling of the word in the text coincides We based our work on the following principles: exactly with that of a word in the dictionary, i. 1. Maximum separation of the dictionary from e . , their numerical codes coincide, this fact the translation program. This enables us to can easily be established by the operation of enlarge the dictionary easily without changing matching. This is the principle used for find- the program. ing words in the dictionary. 2. Division of the translation program into two In order to find words in the dictionary which independent parts: analysis of the foreign lan- p ossess an affix (say, 's' or 'ing' or 'ed'), the guage sentence and synthesis of the correspond- machine must discard these endings after which ing Russian sentence. This enables us to uti- it must repeat the search for the word with the lize the same Russian synthesis program in discarded affix. translation from any language. To determine the meaning of a polysemantic 3. Storing all the words in the dictionary in word, the words surrounding it in the given their basic form. This enables us to design sentence are analyzed. Both the semantic and the program for synthesis of the Russian text the grammatical characteristics are established. according to the standard rules of Russian The routines for determining the particular grammar. meaning of a polysemantic word are based on 4. Storing in the dictionary all the constant an elaborate analysis of a great body of con- grammatical properties of words. crete material and are placed together in a 5. Determination of multiple meanings of the special part of the translation program called words from the context, whereas their variant the "polysemantic dictionary". Idiomatic ex- grammatical characteristics are determined by pressions are also included in this part of the analyzing the grammatical structure of the program. sentence. It should be noted that the establishment of These principles have proved quite reliable the most simple and general criteria for deter- in the practice test to which they were subjected. mining a particular meaning of a word (or group Hence it seems to us that they constitute a re- of words) is the result of substantial prelimi- liable basis for the solution of the problem of nary work by our linguists on actual texts. MT. If a word in the sentence to be translated is The contents of the dictionary, for our expe- not found in the dictionary, it is stored unaltered riments, were determined by an analysis of in the memory of the machine. When the trans- mathematical textual material, starting with lated sentence is printed out, such a word will Milne's "Numerical Solution of Differential be printed in Latin script. Equations". For the practical experiments, Investigations in the area of the dictionary which were carried out on the BESM (the USSR are fairly extensive. In our group they have Academy of Sciences' high-speed electronic been carried out by L.N. Korol'ev. Of great importance is the space that a dic- tionary occupies in the memory. A method of † Translated by M. Friedman and M. Halle, MIT. "code compression" devised by L.N. Korol'ev
P roblems of Mechanical Translation 43 Starting with the input of the English sentence considerably reduces this space. into the machine, the entire translation process The automatic translation program is divided has been carried out automatically with no into two main parts — analysis and synthesis. human intervention whatsoever. To make the In the first part, the form of the English machine translate in the manner just described, words, their place in the sentence, and the an enormous amount of preliminary research grammatical information given in the dictionary work by philologists was required especially are analyzed with a view to the determination by I.K. Belskaya, our philologist-in-chief, of both the grammatical form of the correspond- and by the mathematicians I. S. Mukhin, L.N. ing Russian words and their place in the Russian Korol'ev, S.N. Razumovskii, G.P. Zelenke- sentence. The resulting information is record- v ich, and, in the early stages, N.P. Trifonov. ed by means of indices, thereby permitting S.N. Razumovskii has been studying transla- passage to the second part of the program -- tion schemes and programs and their logical "Synthesis of the Russian Sentence". Here, structure. He has developed a system of sym- Russian words, taken from the dictionary in bols that makes possible the recording of the their basic form, acquire grammatical form details of the above mentioned schemes in an in accordance with the indices obtained from appropriate manner. the analysis. Our opinion is that the principles according Both English and Russian grammar is pre- to which machine translation of languages sented as a series of special schemes for the should be organized have been sufficiently cla- basic parts of speech: verbs, nouns, adjectives, rified by now and that the time is ripe to under- numerals, etc. The working basis of each take work on a large scale. We have started scheme is dichotomic analysis, i.e., a system research work in automatic translation from of "checking" for the presence or absence of a German, Chinese, and Japanese into Russian. certain grammatical (morphological or syn- In our discussions of machine translation tactical) characteristic of the analyzed word. from Chinese and Japanese, we thought that In checking, only two answers are possible, great difficulties would be presented by the in- either positive or negative. Each of these put in these languages. However, this problem, answers admits either a final conclusion and apparently, will be solved easily by using the the development of the corresponding gramma- Chinese telegraph code. tical indices for the given word, or the continu- The work on German is being carried out ation of the check for the presence of the next under the direction of Belskaya by G. P. Zelen- characteristic until a definitive answer is ob- kevich and E. A. Khodzinskaya; Chinese by A. tained together with an indication of which A, Zvonov and V. A. Voronin; and Japanese by grammatical indices must be developed for the M. B. Efimov. given word. We also plan soon to take up the problem of Different parts of the program are ordered translation from one foreign language into in a sequence which ensures the development another. For this we intend to use Russian as of the indices necessary to carry out further the "inter-language". operations.