Yorick Wilks

Machine Translation

Its Scope and Limits

• Gebundenes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

Machine Translation (MT) is both an engineering technology and a measure of all things to do with languages and computers-whenever a new theory of language or linguistics is offered, an important criteria for its success is whether or not it will improve machine translation.

This book presents a history of machine translation (MT) from the point of view of a major writer and innovator in the subject. It describes and contrasts a range of approaches to the challenges and problems of this remarkable technology by means of a combination of historic papers along with commentaries to update their significance, both at the time of their writing and now. This volume chronicles the evolution of conflicting approaches to MT towards a somewhat skeptical consensus on future progress. Also included is a discussion of the most recent developments in the field and prospects for the future, which have been much changed by the arrival of the World Wide Web.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Springer / Springer US / Springer, Berlin
• Artikelnr. des Verlages: 12046409, 978-0-387-72773-8
• 2009 edition
• Seitenzahl: 252
• Erscheinungstermin: 14. November 2008
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 234mm x 156mm x 16mm
• Gewicht: 528g
• ISBN-13: 9780387727738
• ISBN-10: 0387727736
• Artikelnr.: 23036227

Autorenporträt

Yorick Wilks is Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Sheffield and a Senior Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute. He is a Fellow of the American and European Associations for Artificial Intelligence, and a member of the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) College of Computing. He is the permanent UK member of the International Committee on Computational Linguistics that runs COLING, the world's major biennial conference. His doctorate at Cambridge was in metaphysical argument, and before Sheffield and Oxford he researched and taught at Cambridge, Stanford, Edinburgh, Essex, and New Mexico State Universities. He has worked on major Government MT projects in the EU (Eurotra) and the US (Pangloss) and was for many years a US Government consultant on the evaluation of MT systems. In 1997 a team working with his design won the Loebner Prize in New York for the best computer conversationalist of the year. He has been a founder, editor or on the Editorial Board of many journals, including the eponymous Journal of Machine Translation. He has written some seven books in the area of Artificial Intelligence and language, published by Routledge. Kluwer, Ablex, Springer and MIT and Cambridge University Presses, the most recent being "Electric Words" (MIT Press, with Louise Guthrie and Brian Slator) and "Artificial Believers" (Ablex, with Afzal Ballim). He is currently the Coordinator of the 13meuro, 4 year, 15 site, European Commission Integrated Project COMPANIONS (see http://www.nlp.shef.ac.uk/companions/) that seeks to develop intelligent, personalized, permanent, conversational interfaces to the Internet. Wilks was awarded the Antonio Zampolli prize by the European Language R esources Association in 2008.  This prize is given to individuals whose work lies within the areas of Language Resources and Language Technology Evaluation with acknowledged contributions to theiradvancements.  He was also the recipient of an ACL Life Achievement Award at the 46th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics this year.  

Inhaltsangabe

MT Past.- Five Generations of MT.- An Artificial Intelligence Approach to Machine Translation.- It Works but How Far Can It Go: Evaluating the SYSTRAN MT System.- MT Present.- Where Am I Coming From: The Reversibility of Analysis and Generation in Natural Language Processing.- What are Interlinguas for MT: Natural Languages, Logics or Arbitrary Notations?.- Stone Soup and the French Room: The Statistical Approach to MT at IBM.- The Revival of US Government MT Research in 1990.- The Role of Linguistic Knowledge Resources in MT.- The Automatic Acquisition of Lexicons for an MT System.- MT Future.- Senses and Texts.- Sense Projection.- Lexical Tuning.- What Would Pragmatics-Based Machine Translation be Like?.- Where was MT at the End of the Century: What Works and What Doesn't?.- The Future of MT in the New Millennium.

Rezensionen

From the reviews: "Yorick Wilks, one of the most famous MT researchers, gives an interesting overview of the past, present, and future of MT; thus, the reader learns about the scope and limits of MT, justifying the subtitle of the book. ... It could be useful to anyone working in the translation business and in NLP. Translators will learn about the historical context of MT, which will make it easier to understand its scope and limitations ... . In conclusion, I do recommend this book." (K. Waldhör, ACM Computing Reviews, June, 2009)