METEO System

Last updated November 22, 2024

The METEO System is a machine translation system specifically designed for the translation of the weather forecasts issued daily by Environment Canada.^[1] The system was used from 1981 to 30 September 2001 by Environment Canada to translate forecasts issued in French in the province of Quebec into English and those issued in English in other Canadian provinces into French.^[2] Since then, a competitor program has replaced METEO System after an open governmental bid.

The system was developed by John Chandioux and was often mentioned as one of the few success stories in the field of machine translation^[3].

History

The METEO System was in operational use at Environment Canada from 1982 to 2001. It stems from a prototype developed in 1975–76 by the TAUM Group, known as TAUM-METEO.

The initial motivation to develop that prototype was that a junior translator came to TAUM to ask for help in translating weather bulletins at Environment Canada. Since all official communications emanating from the Canadian government must be available in French and English, because of the Official Languages Act of 1969, and weather bulletins represent a large amount of translation in real time, junior translators had to spend several months producing first draft translations, which were then revised by seniors. That was a difficult and tedious job, because of the specificities of the English and French sublanguages used, and not very rewarding, as the lifetime of a bulletin is only 4 hours.

TAUM proposed to build a prototype MT system, and Environment Canada agreed to fund the project. A prototype was ready after a few months, with basic integration in the workflow of translation (source and target bulletins travelled over telex lines at the time and MT happened on a mainframe computer). The first version of the system (METEO 1) went into operation on a Control Data CDC 7600 supercomputer in March 1977.

Chandioux then left the TAUM group to manage its operation and improve it, while the TAUM group embarked on a different project (TAUM-aviation, 1977–81). Benoit Thouin made improvements to the initial prototype over the subsequent year, and turned it into an operational system. After three years, METEO 1 had demonstrated the feasibility of microcomputer-based machine translation to the satisfaction of the Canadian government's Translation Bureau of Public Works and Government Services Canada.

METEO 1 was formally adopted in 1981, replacing the junior translators in the workflow. Because of the need for high-quality translation, the revision step, done by senior translators, was maintained. The quality, measured as the percentage of edit operations (inserting or deleting a word counts as 1, replacing as 2) on the MT results, reached 85% in 1985.

Until that time, the MT part was still implemented as a sequence of Q-systems. The Q-systems formalism is a rule-based SLLP (Specialized Language for Linguistic Programming) invented by Alain Colmerauer in 1967 as he was a postdoc coopérant at the TAUM group. He later invented the Prolog language in 1972 after returning to France and becoming a university professor in Marseille-Luminy.

As the engine of the Q-systems is highly non-deterministic, and the manipulated data structures are in some ways too simple, without any types such as string or number, Chandioux encountered limitations in his efforts to raise translation quality and lower computation time to the point he could run it on microcomputers.

In 1981, Chandioux created a new SLLP, or metalanguage for linguistic applications, based on the same basic algorithmic ideas as the Q-systems, but more deterministic, and offering typed labels on tree nodes. Following the advice of Bernard Vauquois and Colmerauer, he created GramR, and developed it for microcomputers.

In 1982, he could start developing in GramR a new system for translating the weather bulletins on a high-end Cromemco microcomputer. METEO 2 went into operation in 1983. The software then ran in 48Kb of central memory with a 5Mb hard disk for paging. METEO 2 was the first MT application to run on a microcomputer.

In 1985, the system had nothing left of the initial prototype, and was officially renamed METEO. It translated about 20 million words per year from English into French, and 10 million words from French into English, with a quality of 97%. Typically, it took 4 minutes for a bulletin in English to be sent from Winnipeg and come back in French after MT and human revision.

In 1996, Chandioux developed a special version of his system (METEO 96) which was used to translate the weather forecasts (different kinds of bulletins) issued by the US National Weather Service during the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta.

The last known version of the system, METEO 5, dates from 1997 and ran on an IBM PC network under Windows NT. It translated 10 pages per second, but was able to fit into a 1.44Mb floppy disk.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts</span> European intergovernmental weather computation organisation based in the UK

The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) is an independent intergovernmental organisation supported by most of the nations of Europe. It is based at three sites: Shinfield Park, Reading, United Kingdom; Bologna, Italy; and Bonn, Germany. It operates one of the largest supercomputer complexes in Europe and the world's largest archive of numerical weather prediction data.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Machine translation</span> Computerized translation between natural languages

Machine translation is use of computational techniques to translate text or speech from one language to another, including the contextual, idiomatic and pragmatic nuances of both languages.

Prolog is a logic programming language that has its origins in artificial intelligence, automated theorem proving and computational linguistics.

Planner is a programming language designed by Carl Hewitt at MIT, and first published in 1969. First, subsets such as Micro-Planner and Pico-Planner were implemented, and then essentially the whole language was implemented as Popler by Julian Davies at the University of Edinburgh in the POP-2 programming language. Derivations such as QA4, Conniver, QLISP and Ether were important tools in artificial intelligence research in the 1970s, which influenced commercial developments such as Knowledge Engineering Environment (KEE) and Automated Reasoning Tool (ART).

Eurotra was a machine translation project established and funded by the European Commission from 1978 until 1992.

Alain Colmerauer was a French computer scientist. He was a professor at Aix-Marseille University, and the creator of the logic programming language Prolog.

TAUM is the name of a research group which was set up at the Université de Montréal in 1965. Most of its research was done between 1968 and 1980.

Computer-aided translation (CAT), also referred to as computer-assisted translation or computer-aided human translation (CAHT), is the use of software, also known as a translator, to assist a human translator in the translation process. The translation is created by a human, and certain aspects of the process are facilitated by software; this is in contrast with machine translation (MT), in which the translation is created by a computer, optionally with some human intervention.

MétéoMédia is a Canadian French-language weather information specialty channel and web site owned by Pelmorex. MétéoMédia primarily serves viewers in Quebec, although some cable TV systems in Ontario and New Brunswick carry the channel as well. It is available nationwide via satellite. MétéoMédia went on the air along with the bilingual specialty service's English-language component, The Weather Network, for the first time on September 1, 1988; both MétéoMédia and The Weather Network broadcast separate 24-hour-a-day feeds.

HIRLAM, the High Resolution Limited Area Model, is a Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) forecast system developed by the international HIRLAM programme.

A definite clause grammar (DCG) is a way of expressing grammar, either for natural or formal languages, in a logic programming language such as Prolog. It is closely related to the concept of attribute grammars / affix grammars. DCGs are usually associated with Prolog, but similar languages such as Mercury also include DCGs. They are called definite clause grammars because they represent a grammar as a set of definite clauses in first-order logic.

Q-systems are a method of directed graph transformations according to given grammar rules, developed at the Université de Montréal by Alain Colmerauer in 1967–70 for use in natural language processing. The Université de Montréal's machine translation system, TAUM-73, used the Q-Systems as its language formalism.

Machine translation is a sub-field of computational linguistics that investigates the use of software to translate text or speech from one natural language to another.

Microsoft Translator or Bing Translator is a multilingual machine translation cloud service provided by Microsoft. Microsoft Translator is a part of Microsoft Cognitive Services and integrated across multiple consumer, developer, and enterprise products, including Bing, Microsoft Office, SharePoint, Microsoft Edge, Microsoft Lync, Yammer, Skype Translator, Visual Studio, and Microsoft Translator apps for Windows, Windows Phone, iPhone and Apple Watch, and Android phone and Android Wear.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nowcasting (meteorology)</span>

Nowcasting is weather forecasting on a very short term mesoscale period of up to 2 hours, according to the World Meteorological Organization, and up to six hours, according to other authors in the field. This forecast is an extrapolation in time of known weather parameters, including those obtained by means of remote sensing, using techniques that take into account a possible evolution of the air mass. This type of forecast therefore includes details that cannot be solved by numerical weather prediction (NWP) models running over longer forecast periods.

memoQ is a proprietary computer-assisted translation software suite which runs on Microsoft Windows operating systems. It is developed by the Hungarian software company memoQ Fordítástechnológiai Zrt., formerly Kilgray, a provider of translation management software established in 2004 and cited as one of the fastest-growing companies in the translation technology sector in 2012, and 2013. memoQ provides translation memory, terminology, machine translation integration and reference information management in desktop, client/server and web application environments.

Brian Harris is a Canadian and British translation researcher.

The 2016–17 South-West Indian Ocean cyclone season was a below-average season, with five tropical storms, three of which intensified into tropical cyclones. It officially began on November 15, 2016, and ended on April 30, 2017, with the exception for Mauritius and the Seychelles, for which it ended on May 15, 2017. These dates conventionally delimit the period of each year when most tropical and subtropical cyclones form in the basin, which is west of 90°E and south of the Equator. Tropical and subtropical cyclones in this basin were monitored by the Regional Specialised Meteorological Centre in Réunion, though the Joint Typhoon Warning Center issued unofficial advisories.

The 2019–20 South-West Indian Ocean cyclone season was a slightly above-average season in tropical cyclone and subtropical cyclone formation west of 90°E. The season officially began on 15 November, however, the formation of the first system—Zone of Disturbed Weather 01—occurred on 22 July 2019, well before the official start of the season. This was the earliest start to a season since the 2016–17 season. The season then officially ended on 30 April 2020, with the exception of Mauritius and the Seychelles, for which it officially ended on 15 May 2020. These dates conventionally delimit the period of each year when most tropical and subtropical cyclones form in the basin, which is west of 90°E and south of the Equator. Tropical and subtropical cyclones in this basin are monitored by the Regional Specialized Meteorological Centre in Réunion.

The 2020–21 South-West Indian Ocean cyclone season was an above-average season which produced 12 named storms, with 7 strengthening into tropical cyclones. The season started with the formation of Cyclone Alicia in the extreme northeast section of the basin on 12 November 2020, just before the official start of the season, which marked the third season in a row in which a tropical cyclone formed before the official start of the season. It officially began on 15 November 2020, and ended with the dissipation of Cyclone Jobo on 24 April, 6 days before the official end on 30 April 2021, with the exception of Mauritius and the Seychelles, which officially ended on 15 May 2021. These dates conventionally delimit the period of each year when most tropical and subtropical cyclones form in the basin, which is west of 90°E and south of the Equator. Tropical and subtropical cyclones in this basin are monitored by the Regional Specialised Meteorological Centre in Réunion and unofficially by the Joint Typhoon Warning Center.

References

↑ Sergei Nirenburg (1993). Progress in machine translation. IOS Press. pp. 246–. ISBN 978-90-5199-074-4 . Retrieved 14 April 2010.
↑ PROCUREMENT PROCESS by Canadian International Trade Tribunal Archived 2011-07-06 at the Wayback Machine , July 30, 2002, consulted 2007-02-10
↑ Boitet, Christian (2024). "Souvenirs d'Alain Colmerauer : TAUM, Prolog, TA". Revue Ouverte d'Intelligence Artificielle (in French). 5 (2–3): 51–63. doi:10.5802/roia.72. ISSN 2967-9672.

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.

[Nirenburg1993-1] Sergei Nirenburg (1993). Progress in machine translation. IOS Press. pp. 246–. ISBN 978-90-5199-074-4 . Retrieved 14 April 2010.

[2] PROCUREMENT PROCESS by Canadian International Trade Tribunal Archived 2011-07-06 at the Wayback Machine , July 30, 2002, consulted 2007-02-10

[3] Boitet, Christian (2024). "Souvenirs d'Alain Colmerauer : TAUM, Prolog, TA". Revue Ouverte d'Intelligence Artificielle (in French). 5 (2–3): 51–63. doi:10.5802/roia.72. ISSN 2967-9672.

[1]

[2]

[3]