Machine Translation, Linguistics, And Interlingua

An adequate, complete, and economical linguistic theory is necessary for MT and the question is whether a consistent use of the often unduly neglected dependency syntax, including a systematic description of topic and focus, cannot serve as a reliable base for the grammar of an interlingua, or of a set of interrelated interface structures. i. As Slocum (198~)convinc~ly shows, the attitude towards translation in general, and therefore also towards automatic translation in the U.S.A. never has been based on urgent wide-spread needs of translating technical texts, and mostly has not been connected with broad interest in theoretical background. Outside the U.S.A., with the exception of G.E.T.A., Grenoble, the research had the character of scattered projects carried out by relatively small groups; only in the recent years the EUROTRA project and, especially, the two Japanese projects bring some hope as for the possibility of sufficiently concentrated research. The question whether linguistics is able to offer a reliable theoretical basis for MT cannot be answered in a qualified way without examining such linguistically based systems as Garvin~s'fulcrum" approach {which was abolished on external grounds, after the unfortunate ALPAC report~ or the systems formulated by Kulagina and Apresyan. Certain features of their frameworks, as well as of Vauquois" (1975; Vauquois and Boitet, 1985~ are more closely connected to classical structural linguistics than is the case with other MT systems. Also in Prague, the research group of MT and formal linguistics at Charles University has devoted much effort (starting at the end of the 1950"s~ to identify the positive results of classical European linguistics and to reformulate them in a metalanguage that would make them usable in the context of Chomskyan (and Montaguean~ methodology and of automated language processing (now see Sgall et al., 1986~. 2. The requirements on lin@uistic theory as a background for MT can be summarized as follows: (a~ Adequacy: The theory should underlie relatively complete descriptions reflecting the structure of language. Since humans differ from computers (in freely combining factual knowledge and other mental capacities with their knowledge and use of language, and in being able to develop their language while using itS, the correspondence between theory and its MT application cannot be immediate. The open-endedness of language makes it necessary to restrict the completeness of the description to a reasonably estimated core of language, leaving the ~ossibly not too large~ periphery inrthe application to postediting, etc.