Abstract

After only 35 years of effective machine translation R&D, I feel about its condition somewhat the way Mao Tse-Tung is said to have felt about the significance of the French Revolution after nearly 200 years: it's too early to tell.
The broad facts are apparent to anyone who reads the newspapers, and are therefore a potentially inconsistent set: MT works, in the sense that everyday MT systems at the Federal Translation Division in Dayton, Ohio, and at the European Commission in Luxembourg produce fully automatic translations that many people use with apparent benefit. Moreover, more than 6,000 MT systems have been sold in Japan alone. But, the failure of intellectual breakthroughs to produce indisputably high-quality, fully automatic MT is also apparent, which has led some to say it is impossible, a claim inconsistent with the first observations.

Date

April 1, 1996

Authors

Yorick Wilks, Kenneth W Church, Sergei Nirenburg, Eduard H Hovy, CA Knoblock

Journal

IEEE Expert: Intelligent Systems and Their Applications

Volume

11

Issue

2

Pages

12-18