The KBMT Project

Machine translation of natural languages is one of the most complex and comprehensive applications of computational linguistics and artificial intelligence. This is especially true of knowledge-based machine translation (KBMT) systems, which require many knowledge resources and processing modules to carry out the necessary levels of analysis, representation and generation of meaning and form. The number of real-world problems, tasks, and solutions involved in developing any realistic-size knowledge-based machine translation system is enormous. It is thus difficult for researchers in the field to learn what a system "really does".

This book fills that need with a detailed case study of a KBMT system implemented at the Center for Machine Translation at Carnegie Mellon University. The research consists in part of the creation of a system for translation between English and Japanese. The corpora used in the project were manuals for installing and maintaining IBM personal computers (sponsorship by IBM, through its Tokyo Research Laboratory) Individual chapters describe the interlingua texts used in knowledge-based machine translation, the grammar formalism embodied in the system, the grammars and lexicons and their roles in the translation process, the process of source language analysis, an augmentation module that interactively and automatically resolves ambiguities remaining after source language analysis, and the generator, which produces target language sentences. Detailed appendices illustrate the process from analysis through generation.

This book is intended for developers, researchers and advanced students in natural language processing and computational linguistics, including all those who have an interest in machine translation and machine-aided translation.