Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Has There Been a Revolution in Machine Translation?

  • Published:
Machine Translation

Abstract

When we compare the contributions on MT in the proceedings of Coling 1988 and Coling-ACL 1998, it seems obvious that in the period between them a revolution has taken place. Often this intuition is formulated as the replacement of linguistic approaches by statistical approaches. On closer inspection, however, this position cannot be defended. An analysis of Rosetta, concentrating on the different levels of discussion and of underlying assumptions, shows that the choice of knowledge from linguistic theories or information theory and corpora is by itself not a decisive issue. More important is the question of how the problem to be solved by an MT system is defined. An analysis of the decisions underlying Verbmobil, resulting in a list corresponding point by point to the one for Rosetta, shows how far-reaching the new approach to defining the problem of MT is. As it is shown that these systems are representative of the work in MT as it was done ten years ago and today, it can reasonably be argued that a revolution in MT has taken place, though not in exactly the way it is often believed.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  • Ahrenberg, Lars, Mikael Andersson and Magnus Merkel: 1998, ‘A Simple Hybrid Aligner for Generating Lexical Correspondences in Parallel Texts’, in Coling-ACL (1998), pp. 29–35.

    Google Scholar 

  • Akbar, Mohammed and Jean Caelen: 1998, ‘Parole et traduction automatique: le module de reconnaissance RAPHAEL’ [Speech and Machine Translation: the Recognition Module RAPHAEL], in Coling-ACL (1998), pp. 36–40.

    Google Scholar 

  • Arnold, Doug, Louisa Sadler and R. Lee Humphreys: 1993, ‘Evaluation: An Assessment’, Machine Translation 8, 1–24.

    Google Scholar 

  • Becker, Tilman, Wolfgang Finkler, Anne Kilger and Peter Poller, Peter: 1998, ‘An Efficient Kernel for Multilingual Generation in Speech-to-Speech Dialogue Translation’, in Coling-ACL (1998), pp. 110–116.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bresnan, Joan (ed.): 1982, The Mental Representation of Grammatical Relations, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bresnan, Joan and Ronald M. Kaplan: 1982, ‘Introduction: Grammars as Mental Representations of Language’, in Bresnan (1982), pp. xvi-lii.

    Google Scholar 

  • Brown, Peter, John Cocke, Stephen Della Pietra, Vincent J. Della Pietra, Fredrick Jelinek, Robert L. Mercer and Paul S. Roossin: 1988, ‘A Statistical Approach to Language Translation’, in Coling (1988), pp. 71–76.

    Google Scholar 

  • Brown, Peter, John Cocke, Stephen Della Pietra, Vincent J. Della Pietra, Fredrick Jelinek, John D. Lafferty, Robert L. Mercer and Paul S. Roossin: 1990, ‘A Statistical Approach to Machine Translation’, Computational Linguistics 16, 79–85.

    Google Scholar 

  • Brown, Peter F., Stephen A. Della Pietra, Vincent J. Della Pietra and Robert L. Mercer: 1993, ‘The Mathematics of Statistical Machine Translation: Parameter Estimation’, Computational Linguistics 19, 263–311.

    Google Scholar 

  • Chen, Hsin-His, Sheng-Jie Huang, Yung-Wei Ding and Shih-Chung Tsai: 1998, ‘Proper Name Translation in Cross-Language Information Retrieval’, in Coling-ACL (1998), pp. 232–236.

    Google Scholar 

  • Choi, Sung-Kwon, Han-Min Jung, Chul-Min Sim, Taewan Kim, Dong-In Park, Jun-Sik Park and Key-Sun Choi: 1998, ‘Hybrid Approaches to Improvement of Translation Quality in Web-based English-Korean Machine Translation’, in Coling-ACL (1998), pp. 251–255.

    Google Scholar 

  • Chomsky, Noam: 1965, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Chomsky, Noam: 1980, ‘Rules and Representations’, The Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3, 1–61.

    Google Scholar 

  • Chomsky, Noam: 1981, Lectures on Government and Binding, Dordrecht: Foris.

    Google Scholar 

  • Coling: 1988, Coling Budapest: Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Budapest: John von Neumann Society for Computing Sciences.

    Google Scholar 

  • Coling-ACL: 1998, Coling-ACL '98: 36th Annual Meeting of the Association of Computational Linguistics and 17th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Proceedings of the Conference, Université de Montréal, Montréal.

    Google Scholar 

  • Collier, Nigel, Kenji Ono and Hideki Hirakawa: 1998, ‘An Experiment in Hybrid Dictionary and Statistical Sentence Alignment’, in Coling-ACL (1998), pp. 268–274.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dorr, Bonnie J.: 1993, Machine Translation: A View from the Lexicon, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dorr, Bonnie J.: 1995, ‘Review of Rosetta, M.T. (1994), Machine Translation, Dordrecht: Kluwer’, Computational Linguistics 21, 582–589.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dorr, Bonnie J. and Maria Katsova: 1998, ‘Lexical Selection for Cross-Language Applications: Combining LCS with WordNet’, in Farwell, David, Laurie Gerber, and Eduard Hovy (eds): 1998, Machine Translation and the Information Soup: Third Cońference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas, AMTA'98, Proceedings, Berlin: Springer Farwell et al. (1998), pp. 438–447.

    Google Scholar 

  • Durand, Jacques, Paul Bennett, Valerio Allegranza, Frank Van Eynde, Lee Humphreys, Paul Schmidt and Erich Steiner: 1991, ‘The Eurotra Linguistic Specifications: An Overview’, Machine Translation 6, 103–147.

    Google Scholar 

  • Emele, Martin C, and Michael Dorna: 1998, ‘Ambiguity Preserving Machine Translation using Packed Representations’, in Coling-ACL (1998), pp. 365–371.

    Google Scholar 

  • Farwell, David, Laurie Gerber, and Eduard Hovy (eds): 1998, Machine Translation and the Information Soup: Third Cońference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas, AMTA'98, Proceedings, Berlin: Springer.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fourla, Athanassia and Olga, Yannoutsou: 1998, ‘Implementing MT in the Greek Public Sector: A Users' Survey’, in Farwell, David, Laurie Gerber, and Eduard Hovy (eds): 1998, Machine Translation and the Information Soup: Third Cońference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas, AMTA'98, Proceedings, Berlin: Springer Farwell et al. (1998), pp. 300–307.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fung, Pascale: 1998, ‘A Statistical View on Bilingual Lexicon Extraction: From Parallel Corpora to Non-parallel Corpora’, in Farwell, David, Laurie Gerber, and Eduard Hovy (eds): 1998, Machine Translation and the Information Soup: Third Cońference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas, AMTA'98, Proceedings, Berlin: Springer Farwell et al. (1995), pp. 1–17.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gazdar, Gerald: 1996, ‘Paradigm Merger in Natural Language Processing’, in Ian Wand and Robin Milner (eds), Computing Tomorrow: Future Research Directions in Computer Science, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 88–109.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gazdar, Gerald, Ewan Klein, Geoffrey Pullum and Ivan Sag: 1985, Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar, Oxford: Blackwell.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gdaniec, Claudia: 1998, ‘Lexical Choice and Syntactic Generation in a Transfer System: Transformations in the New LMT English-German System’, in Farwell, David, Laurie Gerber, and Eduard Hovy (eds): 1998, Machine Translation and the Information Soup: Third Cońference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas, AMTA'98, Proceedings, Berlin: Springer Farwell et al. (1998), pp. 408–420.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hong, Munpyo: 1998, ‘Multiple-Subject Constructions in the Multilingual MT-System CAT2’, in Farwell, David, Laurie Gerber, and Eduard Hovy (eds): 1998, Machine Translation and the Information Soup: Third Cońference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas, AMTA'98, Proceedings, Berlin: Springer Farwell et al. (1998), pp. 174–186.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hoyningen-Huene, Paul: 1989, Die Wissenschaftsphilosophie Thomas S. Kuhns [Thomas S. Kuhn's Philosophy of Science], Braunschweig: Vieweg.

    Google Scholar 

  • Katz, Jerrold J. and Paul M. Postal: 1991, ‘Realism vs. Conceptualism in Linguistics’, Linguistics and Philosophy 14, 515–554.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kay, Martin, Jean Mark Gawron and Peter Norvig: 1994, Verbmobil: A Translation System for Face-to-Face Dialog, Stanford, CA: CSLI.

    Google Scholar 

  • Klavans, Judith and Philip Resnik (eds): 1996, The Balancing Act: Combining Symbolic and Statistical Approaches to Language, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kuhn, Thomas S.: 1970, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Second Edition, Enlarged, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kuhn, Thomas S.: 1971, ‘Notes on Lakatos’, in Roger C. Buck and Robert S. Cohen (eds), Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science VIII, Dordrecht: Reidel, pp. 137–146.

    Google Scholar 

  • Laudan, Larry: 1977, Progress and Its Problems: Towards a Theory of Scientific Growth, Berkeley: University of California Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lehrberger, John and Laurent Bourbeau: 1988, Machine Translation: Linguistic Characteristics of MT Systems and General Methodology of Evaluation, Amsterdam: Benjamins.

    Google Scholar 

  • Loehr, Dan: 1998, ‘Can Simultaneous Interpretation Help Machine Translation?’, in Farwell, David, Laurie Gerber, and Eduard Hovy (eds): 1998, Machine Translation and the Information Soup: Third Cońference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas, AMTA'98, Proceedings, Berlin: Springer Farwell et al. (1998), pp. 213–224.

    Google Scholar 

  • Macgaard, Bente and Sergei Perschke: 1991, ‘Eurotra: General System Design’, Machine Translation 6, 73–82.

    Google Scholar 

  • Margolis, Howard: 1993, Paradigms and Barriers: How Habits of Mind Govern Scientific Beliefs, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • McCarley, J. Scott and Salim Roukos: 1998, ‘Fast Document Translation for Cross-Language Information Retrieval’, in Farwell, David, Laurie Gerber, and Eduard Hovy (eds): 1998, Machine Translation and the Information Soup: Third Cońference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas, AMTA'98, Proceedings, Berlin: Springer Farwell et al. (1998), pp. 150–157.

    Google Scholar 

  • McCord, Michael C.: 1989, ‘Design of LMT: A Prolog-Based Machine Translation System’, Computational Linguistics 15, 33–52.

    Google Scholar 

  • McCord, Michael C. and Bernth Arendse: 1998, ‘The LMT Transformational System’, in Farwell, David, Laurie Gerber, and Eduard Hovy (eds): 1998, Machine Translation and the Information Soup: Third Cońference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas, AMTA'98, Proceedings, Berlin: Springer Farwell et al. (1998), pp. 344–355.

    Google Scholar 

  • Melamed, I. Dan: 1998, ‘Empirical Methods for MT Lexicon Development’, in Farwell, David, Laurie Gerber, and Eduard Hovy (eds): 1998, Machine Translation and the Information Soup: Third Cońference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas, AMTA'98, Proceedings, Berlin: Springer Farwell et al. (1998), pp. 18–30.

    Google Scholar 

  • Melby, Alan K.: 1988, ‘Lexical Transfer: Between a Source Rock and a Hard Target’, in Coling (1988), pp. 411–413.

    Google Scholar 

  • Melby, Alan K.: 1995, The Possibility of Language: A Discussion of the Nature of Language, with Implications for Human and Machine Translation, Amsterdam: Benjamins.

    Google Scholar 

  • Miller, Keith J. and David M. Zajic: 1998, ‘Lexicons as Gold: Mining, Embellishment, and Reuse’, in Farwell, David, Laurie Gerber, and Eduard Hovy (eds): 1998, Machine Translation and the Information Soup: Third Cońference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas, AMTA'98, Proceedings, Berlin: Springer Farwell et al. (1998), pp. 484–493.

    Google Scholar 

  • Montague, Richard: 1970, ‘Universal Grammar’, Theoria 36, 373–398.

    Google Scholar 

  • van Munster, Elly: 1988, ‘The Treatment of Scope and Negation in Rosetta’ in (Coling 1988), pp. 442–447.

    Google Scholar 

  • Newmeyer, Frederick J.: 1986, ‘Has there been a ‘Chomskyan Revolution’ in Linguistics?’, Language 62, 1–18.

    Google Scholar 

  • Nirenburg, Sergei: 1987, ‘Knowledge and Choices in Machine Translation’, in Sergei Nirenburg (ed.), Machine Translation: Theoretical and Methodological Issues, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1–21.

    Google Scholar 

  • Percival, W. Keith: 1976, ‘The Applicability of Kuhn's Paradigms to the History of Linguistics’, Language 52, 285–294.

    Google Scholar 

  • Read, Tim and Elena Barcena: 1998, ‘JaBot: A Multilingual Java-Based Intelligent Agent for Web Sites’, in Coling-ACL (1998), pp. 1086–1090.

    Google Scholar 

  • Reijnders, Lucas: 1997, Het boerenbedrijf in de Lage Landen: Geschiedenis en toekomst [Farming in the Low Countries: History and Future], Amsterdam: Van Gennep.

    Google Scholar 

  • Rosetta, M. T.: 1994, Compositional Translation, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sampson, Geoffrey: 1987, ‘Probabilistic Models of Analysis’, in Roger Garside, Geoffrey Leech and Geoffrey Sampson (eds), The Computational Analysis of English: A Corpus-Based Approach, London: Longman, pp. 16–29.

    Google Scholar 

  • Somers, Harold L.: 1998, ‘“New Paradigms” in MT: The State of the Art Now that the Dust Has Settled’, in Frank Van Eynde (ed.), Proceedings of the Workshop on Machine Translation, 10th European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information, Saarbrücken, pp. 22–33.

    Google Scholar 

  • Steiner, Erich H. and Jutta Winter-Thielen: 1988, ‘On the Semantics of Focus Phenomena in Eurotra’, in Coling (1988), pp. 630–635.

    Google Scholar 

  • Stolze, Radegundis: 1994, Übersetzungstheorien: Eine Einführung [Translation Theories: An Introduction], Tübingen: Narr.

    Google Scholar 

  • ten Hacken, Pius: 1997, ‘Progress and Incommensurability in Linguistics’, Beiträge zur Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft 7, 287–310.

    Google Scholar 

  • ten Hacken, Pius: 1998, ‘Chomskyan Linguistics and HPSG as Competing Research Programmes’, in Bernard Caron (ed.), Actes du 16e Congrès International des Linguistes, Oxford: Pergamon, Paper 0042.

    Google Scholar 

  • ten Hacken, Pius: 1998, ‘Review of Melby, Alan K. (1995), The Possibility of Language: A Discussion of the Nature of Language, with Implications for Human and Machine Translation, Amsterdam: Benjamins’, Language 74, 232–233.

    Google Scholar 

  • ten Hacken, Pius: 2000, Reusability and Research Programmes in Computational Linguistics, Habilitationsschrift, Universität Basel.

    Google Scholar 

  • Thorne, James Peter: 1965, ‘Review of Postal, Paul (1964), Constituent Structure: A Study of Contemporary Models of Syntactic Description, The Hague: Mouton’, Journal of Linguistics 1, 73–76.

    Google Scholar 

  • Van Eynde, Frank: 1988, ‘The Analysis of Tense and Aspect in Eurotra’, in Coling (1988), pp. 699–704.

    Google Scholar 

  • Van Eynde, Frank: 1998, ‘Review of Rosetta, M. T. (1994), Machine Translation, Dordrecht: Kluwer’, Journal of Logic, Language and Computation 7, 107–110.

    Google Scholar 

  • Weaver, Warren: 1949, ‘Translation’, ms. reprinted in William N. Locke and A. Donald Booth (eds), Machine Translation of Languages, Fourteen Essays, Cambridge, MA: Technology Press of MIT (1955), pp. 15–23.

  • Woszczyna, Monika, Matthew Broadhead, Donna Gates, Marsal Gavaldà, Alon Lavie, Lori Levin and Alex Waibel: 1998, ‘A Modular Approach to Spoken Language Translation for Large Domains’, in Farwell, David, Laurie Gerber, and Eduard Hovy (eds): 1998, Machine Translation and the Information Soup: Third Cońference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas, AMTA'98, Proceedings, Berlin: Springer Farwell et al. (1998), pp. 31–40.

    Google Scholar 

  • Yang, Jin and Elke D. Lange: 1998, ‘SYSTRAN on AltaVista: A User Study on Real-Time Machine Translation on the Internet’, in Farwell, David, Laurie Gerber, and Eduard Hovy (eds): 1998, Machine Translation and the Information Soup: Third Cońference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas, AMTA'98, Proceedings, Berlin: Springer Farwell et al. (1998), pp. 275–285.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Abt. Geisteswiss. Informatik, Universität Basel, Petersgaben 51, 4051, Basel, Switzerland

    Pius Ten Hacken

Authors
  1. Pius Ten Hacken
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Ten Hacken, P. Has There Been a Revolution in Machine Translation?. Machine Translation 16, 1–19 (2001). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1013140921280

Download citation

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1013140921280

Search

Navigation