Contextual analysis

IN THE VARIOUS PROPOSALS for word-forword machine translation of Russian scientific literature into English, each word in the sentence is considered as a separate entity. If a word has more than one English equivalent, or more than one possible syntactic value, the alternatives must be listed. The chief difficulty with the resulting translation is its prolixity: the reader finds himself confronted with numerous alternatives, both syntactic and semantic, in every sentence. The extent of the problem of ambiguity is suggested by the following figures: from a sample Russian scientific text, 43% of the running words were found to be polysemantic (this in addition to syntactic ambiguities which the reader must solve on the basis of numerous alternatives given him in every sentence).