Cecil MacPherson


2008

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Meeting Army Foreign language Requirements with the Aid of Machine Translation
Cecil MacPherson | Devin Rollis | Irene Zehmisch
Proceedings of the 8th Conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas: Government and Commercial Uses of MT

The United States Army has a wide range of language requirements, varying greatly in both the number of requisite languages, and the complexity of the tasks for which language translation is crucial. Machine language translation will be an important part of the support needed to translate documents, monitor news media, and engage non-English speakers in conversation. The machine language translation community has made significant advances in the technology over the past several years, and the Army is looking to both support research and development, and to capitalize on the technology to improve communication and save lives. The Army Language Requirements Branch and the Sequoyah Program Office have received several requests from language technology developers for information on the direction and end-state goals of the Sequoyah program. In this paper, we will attempt to describe the Army’s language needs and to document requirements and goals for a machine language translation program.