Báo cáo khoa học: Preliminary Report on the Insertion of English Articles in RussianEnglish MT Output

Research on a non-statistical scheme for the insertion of English articles in machine-translated Russian is described. Ideal article insertion as a goal is challenged as unreasonable. Classification of English nouns, simple syntactic criteria, and multiple printout are the schemes main features.
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Báo cáo khoa học: Preliminary Report on the Insertion of English Articles in RussianEnglish MT Output"" [Mechanical Translation, vol. 8, No. 1, August 1964] Preliminary Report on the Insertion of English Articles in Russian- English MT Output* by G. R. Martins, Technical Staff, Bunker-Ramo Corporation Research on a non-statistical scheme for the insertion of English articles in machine-translated Russian is described. Ideal article insertion as a goal is challenged as unreasonable. Classification of English nouns, sim- ple syntactic criteria, and multiple printout are the schemes main features. the human translator, and which appear to be well be- One of the most discussed problems in the automatic yond the reach of MT machines as presently pro-translation of Russian documents into English is the grammed.insertion of English articles in the output. Approaches These considerations have led me to the conclusion,to the solution of this problem, where it has been con- surprising perhaps to some, that it is both impossiblesidered at all, are as varied as the basic MT programs and undesirable to attempt the automatic determina-in use by the different teams engaged in this work. tion of a single English article appropriate to the oc-Most projects, however, either use statistical criteria in currence of every nominal encountered in the outputthe determination of English articles to the exclusion of text. Which is to say that we should be prepared to doall other considerations, or use a combined syntactico- without articles altogether, or to accept alternativestatistical method; the aim of all such routines is the articles in the final printed translation. The formerselection of one and only one of the four articles (a, solution, presently in use by some teams, is not quitean, the, Ø). None of the solutions presented to date in so harmless as it appears, for the reason that Ø is asthe literature is entirely satisfactory. legitimate an English article as arc the, a, and an, to Two kinds of ambiguity present themselves as obsta- my way of thinking. The decision (or pseudo-decision)cles to the successful determination of English articles to do without articles altogether, then, amounts to ain automatically translated Russian. The first derives decision to select everywhere the article Ø , and this isfrom the structure of the Russian language, in that it scarcely more defensible than to select everywhere thedoes not employ any simple elements isomorphic with (which is statistically much more common).English articles as adjuncts to nominal phrases—thereare no elements in Russian text which may be corre- The decision to print out alternative articles in somelated strongly with the English articles. This kind of instances is tantamount to passing on a portion of theambiguity is not always formally resolvable since it translation function to the reader, of course. While thisoften raises the particular question: What did the hardly fulfills the idealists goal for MT, it is not anauthor mean in this instance? In such instances, even indefensible solution; th ...