Abstract
Progress in Machine Translation (MT) during the last ten years has been observed at different levels, but discourse has yet to make a breakthrough. MT research and development has concentrated so far mostly on sentence translation (discourse analysis being a very complicated task) and the successful operation of most of the working MT systems does not usually go beyond the sentence level. To start with, the paper will refer to the MT research and development in the last ten years at the IAI in Saarbrücken. Next, the MT discourse issues will be discussed both from the point of view of source language analysis and target text generation, and on the basis of the preliminary results of an ongoing "discourse-oriented MT" project . Probably the most important aspect in successfully analysing multisentential source texts is the capacity to establish the anaphoric references to preceding discourse entities. The paper will discuss the problem of anaphora resolution from the perspective of MT. A new integrated model for anaphora resolution, developed for the needs of MT, will be also outlined. As already mentioned, most machine translation systems perform translation sentence by sentence. But even in the case of paragraph translation, the discourse structure of the target text tends to be identical to that of the source text. However, the sublanguage discourse structures may differ across the different languages, and thus a translated text which assumes the same discourse structure as the source text may sound unnatural and perhaps disguise the true intent of the writer. Finally, the paper will outline a new approach for generating discourse structures, appropriate to the target sublanguage and will discuss some of the complicated problems encountered.- Anthology ID:
- 1994.bcs-1.8
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Machine Translation: Ten years on
- Month:
- November 12-14
- Year:
- 1994
- Address:
- Cranfield University, UK
- Venue:
- BCS
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Note:
- Pages:
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/1994.bcs-1.8
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Ruslan Mitkov and Johann Haller. 1994. Machine translation, ten years on: Discourse has yet to make a breakthrough. In Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Machine Translation: Ten years on, Cranfield University, UK.
- Cite (Informal):
- Machine translation, ten years on: Discourse has yet to make a breakthrough (Mitkov & Haller, BCS 1994)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/1994.bcs-1.8.pdf