Abstract
We are exploring the historical significance of research in the field of machine translation conducted by Bulcsú László, Croatian linguist, who was a pioneer in machine translation in Yugoslavia during the 1950s. We are focused on two important seminal papers written by members of his research group between 1959 and 1962, as well as their legacy in establishing a Croatian machine translation program based around the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences of the University of Zagreb in the late 1950s and early 1960s. We are exploring their work in connection with the beginnings of machine translation in the USA and USSR, motivated by the Cold War and the intelligence needs of the period. We also present the approach to machine translation advocated by the Croatian group in Yugoslavia, which is different from the usual logical approaches of the period, and his advocacy of cybernetic methods, which would be adopted as a canon by the mainstream AI community only decades later.
The first author’s (S.S.) research was supported by the short-term grant Philosophical Aspects of Logic, Language and Cybernetics funded by the University of Zagreb under the Short-term Research Support Program.
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Notes
- 1.
Which, back then, was somewhat confusingly called “mathematical logic”. This difference arises from the fact that up until modal logic took off in the 1960s, the main difference in logic was between “traditional (informal) logic” (or in the case of the Soviet Union it was called “dialectical logic”) and the formal version championed by Frege, Russell, Quine and many others which was termed “mathematical logic”, to delineate its formal nature. When modal logic semantics came into the picture, an abundancy of philosophical theories could suddenly be formalized, such as time, knowledge, action, duty and paradox and these logics became collectively referred to as “philosophical logic”, and the term “mathematical logic” was redefined to include logical topics of interest to mathematicians, such as set theory, recursive structures, algebraically closed fields and topological semantics. This change in terminology was possible since the invention of modal semantics made both fields completely formal.
- 2.
At the present time, the Institute for Telecommunications and the Institute for Regulatory and Signal Devices are integrated in the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing of the University of Zagreb.
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Skansi, S., Mršić, L., Skelac, I. (2020). A Lost Croatian Cybernetic Machine Translation Program. In: Skansi, S. (eds) Guide to Deep Learning Basics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37591-1_7
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