ULTRA (machine translation system)

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ULTRA is a machine translation system created for five languages (Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, English, and German) in the Computing Research Laboratory in 1991.

Machine translation, sometimes referred to by the abbreviation MT is a sub-field of computational linguistics that investigates the use of software to translate text or speech from one language to another.

Contents

ULTRA (Universal Language Translator), is a machine translation system developed at the Computing Research Laboratory, [1] which can translate between five languages (Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, English and German). It uses Artificial intelligence as well as linguistic and logic programming methods. The main goal of the system is to be robust, to cover general language and to be simple to use. It uses bidirectional parsers/generators.

In computer science, artificial intelligence (AI), sometimes called machine intelligence, is intelligence demonstrated by machines, in contrast to the natural intelligence displayed by humans. Colloquially, the term "artificial intelligence" is often used to describe machines that mimic "cognitive" functions that humans associate with the human mind, such as "learning" and "problem solving".

Logic programming is a type of programming paradigm which is largely based on formal logic. Any program written in a logic programming language is a set of sentences in logical form, expressing facts and rules about some problem domain. Major logic programming language families include Prolog, answer set programming (ASP) and Datalog. In all of these languages, rules are written in the form of clauses:

Parsing, syntax analysis, or syntactic analysis is the process of analysing a string of symbols, either in natural language, computer languages or data structures, conforming to the rules of a formal grammar. The term parsing comes from Latin pars (orationis), meaning part.

The system has a language-independent system of intermediate representation, which means that it takes into account needs for expression (expression is one of the main elements of language) and it uses relaxation techniques to provide the best translation. It used an X Window user interface. [2]

X Window System windowing system for bitmap displays on UNIX-like systems

The X Window System is a windowing system for bitmap displays, common on Unix-like operating systems.

ULTRA's databases

Operation

Users paste a sentence into the "source" window. They chose a target language and press Translate. [3] The tool translates the source text, taking into consideration what is said, how it is said and why it is said.

Lexical entries in the system have two parts:

ULTRA works with Intermediate representation of the language between the systems, so no transfer takes place. Each language has its own systems, which are independent. Having the independent systems gives an extra benefit. Adding another language does not disrupt existing language translations.

An Intermediate representation (IR) is the data structure or code used internally by a compiler or virtual machine to represent source code. An IR is designed to be conducive for further processing, such as optimization and translation. A "good" IR must be accurate – capable of representing the source code without loss of information – and independent of any particular source or target language. An IR may take one of several forms: an in-memory data structure, or a special tuple- or stack-based code readable by the program. In the latter case it is also called an intermediate language.

Intermediate representation

Developers David Farwell and Yorick Wilks created IR (interlingual representation). It was a base for analyzing and generating expressions. [4]

They analyzed many different types of communications (business letters, documents, emails) to compare the communication style. ULTRA looks for the best words for some kinds of information and good forms and equivalents for some expression in target language.

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MedSLT is a medium-ranged open source spoken language translator developed by the University of Geneva. It is funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. The system has been designed for the medical domain. It currently covers the doctor-patient diagnosis dialogues for the domains of headache, chest and abdominal pain in English, French, Japanese, Spanish, Catalan and Arabic. The vocabulary used ranges from 350 to 1000 words depending on the domain and language pair.

References

  1. ↑ Farwell & Wilks, 1989
  2. ↑ Austermuhl, Frank (2001). Electronic tools for translations. Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing. ISBN   1900650347.
  3. ↑ Wilks, Yorick (2009). Machine Translation. Its Scope and Limits. Springer Science+Business Media LLC. ISBN   9780387727738.
  4. ↑ Farwell David, Wilks Yorick (1991). "ULTRA: A multilingual machine translator".

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