Robotics Reference
In-Depth Information
One of the participants at Bar-Hillel's conference was Leon Dostert,
who went away convinced that “rather than attempt to resolve theoret-
ically a rather vast segment of the problem, it would be more fruitful
to make an actual experiment, limited in scope but significant in terms
of broader implications”. [7] Dostert's aim was a system requiring no
pre-editing of the input, and producing “clear, complete statements in
intelligible language at the output”, although “certain stylistic revisions
may...be required..., just as when the translation is done by human
beings.”
In 1953, a team at Georgetown University, led by Dostert, collab-
orated with IBM to create the world's first working MT program, one
that could translate from Russian into English. They chose Russian for
their first experiments because it was a difficult language and they be-
lieved that a system that could translate Russian could handle anything.
For the demonstration program a corpus of 49 Russian sentences with a
dictionary of only 250 words had been carefully selected. The Russian
words were coded in a system employing three types of symbols (called
diacritics). One type of symbol indicated which of six rules of operation
was to be applied in the translation. Another type indicated what infor-
mation about the context of a word should be sought to determine the
choice of output. And a third type indicated the location of the storage
area of the English equivalents.
The program had six rules that governed its operation:
1. In the simplest case the source word is replaced by the target word,
and the word order of the source sentence is followed.
2. This case involves a change in the order in which the words appear
in the target sentence—the order of the words is swapped around.
3. There is a choice between different equivalent target words. The
program determines which word is chosen by referring to a symbol
attached to the
next
word.
4. There is a choice between different equivalent target words. The
program determines which word is chosen by referring to a symbol
attached to the
previous
word.
5. A word in the source sentence is omitted because it is superflu-
ous, and therefore might be confusing if it appeared in the target
