Abstract
This paper describes Expedition, an environment designed to facilitate the quick ramp-up of MT systems from practically any alphabetic language (L) into English. The central component of Expedition is a knowledge-elicitation system that guides a linguistically naive bilingual speaker through the process of describing L in terms of its ecological, morphological, grammatical, lexical, and transfer information. Expedition also includes a module for converting the elicited information into the format expected by the underlying MT system and an MT engine that relies on both the elicited knowledge and resident knowledge about English. The Expedition environment is integrated using a configuration and control system. Expedition represents an innovative approach to answering the need for rapid-configuration MT by preparing an MT system in which the only missing link is information about L, which is elicited in a structured fashion such that it can be directly exploited by the system. In this paper we report on the current state of Expedition with an emphasis on the knowledge elicitation system.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Amtrup, Jan W.: 1998, Maschinelles Dolmetschen mit Mehr-Ebenen-Charts [Machine interpreting with multi-layered charts], Ph.D. thesis, Universiät Hamburg.
Amtrup, Jan W., Karine Megerdoomian, and Rémi Zajac: 2000, ‘Rapid Development of Translation Tools: Application to Persian and Turkish’, in Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Computational Linguistics COLING 2000 in Europe, Saarbrücken, Germany, pp. 982–986.
Amtrup, Jan W., and Rémi Zajac: 2000, ‘A Modular Toolkit for Machine Translation Based on Layered Charts’, in COLING-2000 Workshop: Using Toolsets and Architectures to Build NLP Systems, Luxembourg.
Blythe, J., J. Kim, S. Ramachandran, and Y. Gil: 2001, ‘An Integrated Environment for Knowledge Acquisition’, in International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, Santa Fe, NewMexico, pp. 13–20.
Boose, J. H. and J. M. Bradshaw: 1987, ‘Expertise Transfer and Complex Problems: Using AQUINAS as a Knowledge Acquisition Workbench for Knowledge-Based Systems’, International Journal of Man-Machine Studies 26, 3–28.
Carbonell, Jaime, Katharina Probst, Erik Peterson, Christian Monson, Alon Lavie, Ralf Brown, and L. Levin: 2002, ‘Automatic Rule Learning for Resource-Limited MT’, in S. D. Richardson (ed.), Machine Translation: From Research to Real Users: 5th Conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas, AMTA 2002, Springer, Berlin, pp. 1–10.
Comrie, Bernard and Norval Smith: 1977, ‘Lingua Descriptive Studies: Questionnaire’, Lingua 42, 1–72.
Eshelman, L., D. Ehret, J. McDermott, and M. Tan: 1987, ‘MOLE: A Tenacious Knowledge Acquisition Tool’, International Journal of Man-Machine Studies 26, 41–54.
Gaines, B. R. and M. L. G. Shaw: 1993, ‘Eliciting Knowledge and Transferring it Effectively to a Knowledge-Based System’, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering 5, 4–14.
Kay, Martin: 1973, ‘The MIND System’, in R. Rustin (ed.), Natural Language Processing, Algorithmic Press, New York, pp. 155–188.
Kay, Martin: 1996, ‘Chart Generation’, in 34th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Santa Cruz, CA, pp. 200–204.
Longacre, R. E.: 1964, Grammar Discovery Procedures, Mouton, The Hague.
McShane, M.: forthcoming, ‘Redefining “Paradigm” for Computer-Aided Language Instruction’, to appear in Foreign Language Annals.
McShane, M. and S. Nirenburg: 2003, ‘Blasting Open a Choice Space: Learning Inflectional Morphology for NLP’, Computational Intelligence 19, 111–135.
McShane, M. and S. Nirenburg: forthcoming, ‘Parameterizing, Eliciting and Processing Text Elements Across Languages’, forthcoming in Machine Translation.
Motta, Enrico, Tim Rajan, and Marc Eisenstadt: n.d., ‘A Methodology and Tool for Knowledge Acquisition’, Technical report, Human Condition Research Laboratory, Open University, Milton Keynes, UK. Available at citeseer.nj.nec.com/159278.html.
Musen, M. A., L. M. Fagan, D. M. Combs, and E. H. Shortliffe: 1987, ‘Use of a Domain Model to Drive an Interactive Knowledge Editing Tool’, International Journal of Man-Machine Studies 26, 105–121.
Nirenburg, Sergei: 1996, ‘On Supply-Side Vs. Demand-Side Lexical Semantics’, in Proceedings of the ACL SIGLEX Workshop on Breadth and Depth of Semantic Lexicons, Santa Cruz, CA.
Nirenburg, S.: 1998, ‘Project Boas: “A Linguist in the Box” as a Multi-Purpose Language Resource Paper’, in Proceedings of the First International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, Granada, Spain, pp. 739–745.
Oflazer, Kemal, Sergei Nirenburg, and Marjorie McShane: 2001, ‘Bootstrapping Morphological Analyzers by Combining Human Elicitation and Machine Learning’, Computational Linguistics 27, 59–85.
Probst, Katharina and Lori Levin: 2002, ‘Challenges in Automated Elicitation of a Controlled Bilingual Corpus’, in Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Theoretical and Methodological Issues in Machine Translation (TMI-2002), Keihanna, Japan, pp. 157–167.
Zajac, Rémi: 1992, ‘Inheritance and Constraint-Based Grammar Formalisms’, Computational Linguistics 18, 159–182.
Zajac, Rémi: 1998, ‘Feature Structures, Unification and Finite-State Transducers’, in FSMNLP'98, International Workshop on Finite State Methods in Natural Language Processing, Ankara, Turkey.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
McShane, M., Nirenburg, S., Cowie, J. et al. Embedding Knowledge Elicitation and MT Systems within a Single Architecture. Machine Translation 17, 271–305 (2002). https://doi.org/10.1023/B:COAT.0000021160.55368.52
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/B:COAT.0000021160.55368.52