Department of Computer Science
                       State University of New York at Buffalo


                       CS 705:  SEMINAR:  MACHINE TRANSLATION



          Semester:    Fall 1986            Instructor: William J. Rapaport
          Time:        tba                  Office:     Bell 214
          Room:        tba                  Phone:      636-3193
          Office Hours:tba & by appointment Email:      rapaport


          TOPICS:

          o+    Machine translation (MT)-the use of a  computer  to  provide
               automatic   translations   from   one  natural  language  to
               another-was one of the earliest goals of AI.  It may even be
               said  to  pre-date AI, since the earliest suggestions for it
               were suggested by code-breaking strategies developed  during
               World  War  II.   The  early  work  was  generally  deemed a
               failure,  because  it  did  not  take  semantics-or  ``world
               knowledge''-into   account.    Recent   work,  however,  has
               apparently succeeded far beyone anyone's  hopes  after  that
               initial failure.

               As seen from an AI perspective,  MT  embodies  many  of  the
               major  problems of natural-language understanding:  parsing,
               knowledge  representation  and  reasoning,  and  generation.
               Moreover,   differences   between  fully  automatic  MT  and
               machine-aided-translation (MAT) (either interactive, or with
               pre-  or  post-editing)  raise  interesting  questions about
               computer-human interaction and about  the  attainability  of
               some of the goals of AI.

          o+    This seminar will be focused around careful readings of some
               of  the important early writings about MT, as well as inves-
               tigations of recent MT and MAT systems.  I will also present
               some  of the standard natural-language processing techniques
               for parsing and generating (so that this course may serve as
               a brief introduction to natural-language processing).

          MECHANICS OF THE COURSE:

          o+    Students registered for the  seminar  will  be  expected  to
               write  a  10-15  page  term  paper and/or build a small (but
               interesting) M(A)T system (accompanied by a full  report  on
               the  system).   There  will also be an oppportunity for (and
               perhaps even a requirement of!) seminar presentations.

          o+    The grade will be a weighted average of  seminar  participa-
               tion and the project grade (probably 2/3-1/3).


                                    TENTATIVE SCHEDULE


           (1)   Weaver, Warren (1949), ``Translation,'' in W. N.  Locke  &
                 A. D. Booth (eds.), Machine Translation of Languages (Cam-
                 bridge, MA:  MIT Press, 1955):  15-23.

           (2)

          A.   Bar-Hillel, Yehoshua, ``Some Linguistic Obstacles to Machine
               Translation,''  Appendix  II of Y. Bar-Hillel, ``The Present
               Status of Automatic Translation of Languages,'' in F. L. Alt
               (ed.),  Advances  in  Computers  (New York:  Academic Press,
               1960):  91-163.

          B.   Bar-Hillel, Yehoshua, ``A Demonstration of the  Nonfeasibil-
               ity of Fully Automatic, High Quality Translation,'' Appendix
               III of Y. Bar-Hillel,  ``The  Present  Status  of  Automatic
               Translation  of Languages,'' in F. L. Alt (ed.), Advances in
               Computers (New York:  Academic Press, 1960):  91-163.

           (3)   The ALPAC Report.

           (4)   Slocum, Jonathan (1985), ``A Survey  of  Machine  Transla-
                 tion:   Its  History,  Current  Status,  and  Future Pros-
                 pects,'' Computational Linguistics 11:  1-17.

           (5)   Issues in machine translation.

           (6)   Natural-language processing:  parsing, knowledge represen-
                 tation, generation; SNePS.

           (7)   Seminar presentations on particular MT systems.

           (8)

          A.   Quine, Willard Van Orman (1960), Word and Object, Chaps. 1-2
               (Cambridge, MA:  MIT Press).

          B.   Quine, Willard Van Orman (1969), ``Ontological Relativity,''
               in  W.  V. O. Quine, Ontological Relativity and Other Essays
               (New York:  Columbia University Press):  26-68.

           (9)   White, John S.; Kay, Martin; and  King,  Margaret  (1986),
                 ``Forum  on Machine Translation,'' Proc. 24th Annual Meet-
                 ing ACL (Columbia Univ.) (Morristown,  NJ:   Assoc.  Comp.
                 Ling.):  267-70.