Contextual analysis in word-for-word MT

EXPERIMENTS with word-for-word MT of Russian scientific literature have given results which, except for such limited purposes as indexing, are far from satisfactory. The difficulty is not so much one of word order as of syntactic and semantic ambiguity of individual words. Regardless of the treatment of the problem of inflected forms, for example, it is impossible in the majority of instances to identify the grammatical case of Russian nouns. In addition to syntactic ambiguity, multiple equivalents must be assigned to a large percentage of words (to an estimated 45% of the running words in a physics text). The chief disadvantage of word-for-word MT, then, is its prolixity: the reader is confronted with a burdensome multiplicity of potential equivalents (syntactic and semantic) for several words in each sentence. The chief cause of this ambiguity is the fact that each word is examined in isolation, as a discrete item. The human translator operates with the tremendous advantage of something called "context". Broadly speaking, context signifies environment: surrounding words, sentences, and even the subject area itself. Investigation shows that restricted contextual analysis, performed routinely, can resolve most of the problems of ambiguity. Remarkable clarification is attained even when the comparison of a given ambiguous word x is limited to the immediately contiguous word in the sentence (the pre-x or post-x word). Without attempting to rearrange the word order of the Russian sentence, one can obtain the following by comparison of each ambiguous word with the coded grammatical features or semantic class of contiguous words: a) Syntactic clarification. The ambiguity of case forms in nouns can be reduced to an insignificant percentage, and proper English equivalents can be supplied in the form of English prepositions as demanded by the genitive, dative, and instrumental cases. Such prepositions can be withheld in translation when the requirements of Russian grammar demand it. Participles and adverbs which are indistinguishable in form from adjectives, can, be given the correct equivalent; the comparative degree of adjectives and adverbs can be adequately handled. In general, there are no serious problems of syntax which cannot be resolved by reference to the grammatical features of preor post-words.