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.
Similar content being viewed by others
Explore related subjects
Discover the latest articles, news and stories from top researchers in related subjects.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.
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.
Arnold, Doug, Louisa Sadler and R. Lee Humphreys: 1993, ‘Evaluation: An Assessment’, Machine Translation 8, 1–24.
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.
Bresnan, Joan (ed.): 1982, The Mental Representation of Grammatical Relations, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Bresnan, Joan and Ronald M. Kaplan: 1982, ‘Introduction: Grammars as Mental Representations of Language’, in Bresnan (1982), pp. xvi-lii.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Chomsky, Noam: 1965, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Chomsky, Noam: 1980, ‘Rules and Representations’, The Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3, 1–61.
Chomsky, Noam: 1981, Lectures on Government and Binding, Dordrecht: Foris.
Coling: 1988, Coling Budapest: Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Budapest: John von Neumann Society for Computing Sciences.
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.
Collier, Nigel, Kenji Ono and Hideki Hirakawa: 1998, ‘An Experiment in Hybrid Dictionary and Statistical Sentence Alignment’, in Coling-ACL (1998), pp. 268–274.
Dorr, Bonnie J.: 1993, Machine Translation: A View from the Lexicon, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Dorr, Bonnie J.: 1995, ‘Review of Rosetta, M.T. (1994), Machine Translation, Dordrecht: Kluwer’, Computational Linguistics 21, 582–589.
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.
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.
Emele, Martin C, and Michael Dorna: 1998, ‘Ambiguity Preserving Machine Translation using Packed Representations’, in Coling-ACL (1998), pp. 365–371.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Gazdar, Gerald, Ewan Klein, Geoffrey Pullum and Ivan Sag: 1985, Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar, Oxford: Blackwell.
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.
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.
Hoyningen-Huene, Paul: 1989, Die Wissenschaftsphilosophie Thomas S. Kuhns [Thomas S. Kuhn's Philosophy of Science], Braunschweig: Vieweg.
Katz, Jerrold J. and Paul M. Postal: 1991, ‘Realism vs. Conceptualism in Linguistics’, Linguistics and Philosophy 14, 515–554.
Kay, Martin, Jean Mark Gawron and Peter Norvig: 1994, Verbmobil: A Translation System for Face-to-Face Dialog, Stanford, CA: CSLI.
Klavans, Judith and Philip Resnik (eds): 1996, The Balancing Act: Combining Symbolic and Statistical Approaches to Language, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Kuhn, Thomas S.: 1970, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Second Edition, Enlarged, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
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.
Laudan, Larry: 1977, Progress and Its Problems: Towards a Theory of Scientific Growth, Berkeley: University of California Press.
Lehrberger, John and Laurent Bourbeau: 1988, Machine Translation: Linguistic Characteristics of MT Systems and General Methodology of Evaluation, Amsterdam: Benjamins.
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.
Macgaard, Bente and Sergei Perschke: 1991, ‘Eurotra: General System Design’, Machine Translation 6, 73–82.
Margolis, Howard: 1993, Paradigms and Barriers: How Habits of Mind Govern Scientific Beliefs, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
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.
McCord, Michael C.: 1989, ‘Design of LMT: A Prolog-Based Machine Translation System’, Computational Linguistics 15, 33–52.
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.
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.
Melby, Alan K.: 1988, ‘Lexical Transfer: Between a Source Rock and a Hard Target’, in Coling (1988), pp. 411–413.
Melby, Alan K.: 1995, The Possibility of Language: A Discussion of the Nature of Language, with Implications for Human and Machine Translation, Amsterdam: Benjamins.
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.
Montague, Richard: 1970, ‘Universal Grammar’, Theoria 36, 373–398.
van Munster, Elly: 1988, ‘The Treatment of Scope and Negation in Rosetta’ in (Coling 1988), pp. 442–447.
Newmeyer, Frederick J.: 1986, ‘Has there been a ‘Chomskyan Revolution’ in Linguistics?’, Language 62, 1–18.
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.
Percival, W. Keith: 1976, ‘The Applicability of Kuhn's Paradigms to the History of Linguistics’, Language 52, 285–294.
Read, Tim and Elena Barcena: 1998, ‘JaBot: A Multilingual Java-Based Intelligent Agent for Web Sites’, in Coling-ACL (1998), pp. 1086–1090.
Reijnders, Lucas: 1997, Het boerenbedrijf in de Lage Landen: Geschiedenis en toekomst [Farming in the Low Countries: History and Future], Amsterdam: Van Gennep.
Rosetta, M. T.: 1994, Compositional Translation, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic.
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.
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.
Steiner, Erich H. and Jutta Winter-Thielen: 1988, ‘On the Semantics of Focus Phenomena in Eurotra’, in Coling (1988), pp. 630–635.
Stolze, Radegundis: 1994, Übersetzungstheorien: Eine Einführung [Translation Theories: An Introduction], Tübingen: Narr.
ten Hacken, Pius: 1997, ‘Progress and Incommensurability in Linguistics’, Beiträge zur Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft 7, 287–310.
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.
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.
ten Hacken, Pius: 2000, Reusability and Research Programmes in Computational Linguistics, Habilitationsschrift, Universität Basel.
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.
Van Eynde, Frank: 1988, ‘The Analysis of Tense and Aspect in Eurotra’, in Coling (1988), pp. 699–704.
Van Eynde, Frank: 1998, ‘Review of Rosetta, M. T. (1994), Machine Translation, Dordrecht: Kluwer’, Journal of Logic, Language and Computation 7, 107–110.
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.
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.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights 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
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1013140921280