Abstract
Automatic syntactic analysis constituted the theoretical basis of “the new linguistics”, as recommended by ALPAC, and ensured the legitimacy of computational linguistics. It also conditioned the emergence of the Chomskyan program, which actually was closely associated with the horizon of retrospection created by MT, so that it can be identified as one of its horizons of projection.
The development of syntactic analysis in MT centres was the result of three main syntactic approaches, which interacted with each other at one point or another:
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(i)
The distributionalists’ approach, especially that of Hockett and Harris (see Chap. 4)
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(ii)
Bar-Hillel’s approach, directly inspired by Carnap
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(iii)
Chomsky’s approach
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Notes
- 1.
The first mathematisation of language corresponds to the rise of formalisation promoted by the School of Vienna and is characterised by the setting in interaction of algorithms and formal languages resulting from mathematical logic (see Introduction Chap. 1).
- 2.
The linguists commonly referred to as the Neo-Bloomfieldians were followers of Boas, Sapir and Bloomfield. They were linguistic anthropologists focused on the description of American Indian languages that had in common an inductive approach and the use of distributional analysis inaugurated by Bloomfield, whose interest in the mathematisation of language they also shared (see Chap. 4).
- 3.
The notion of constituent structure was first made explicit by Bloomfield (1933), Harris (1946) and Wells (1947). A constituent is any word or group of words which enter into some larger constructions (i.e. group of words). Immediate constituents are the constituents of which any given construction is directly formed. For example, there are two immediate constituents “the old man who lives there” and “has gone to his son’s house” in the utterance “The old man who lives there has gone to his son’s house”. “Old man” is an IC of “old man who lives there”, but not of the whole utterance. However, “there has” or “man who” is not a constituent. The ICs of a given construction are its constituents on the next lower level. Those on any still lower level are constituents but not immediate constituents (from Gleason 1969, pp.128–148).
IC-analysis is a syntactic method; as such its goal is to find the best possible organisation of any given utterance. The end result of IC-analysis is often presented in a visual diagrammatic form that reveals the hierarchical immediate constituent structure of the sentence at hand, for example, (Fig. 6.1).
- 4.
For a formal definition of syntactic connexity, see Ajdukiewicz (1935).
- 5.
Lemmatisation is the process of grouping together the inflected forms of a word so they can be analysed as a single item, identified by the word’s lemma, or dictionary form. For example, the verb “to buy” may appear as “buy”, “buys”, “bought” or “buying”. The lemma “buy” corresponds to the dictionary form.
- 6.
“Parsing” comes from Latin pars orationis (parts of speech). To parse means to break something down into its parts. A syntactic parser is a program that scans a sequence (generally a sentence) and analyses it into its syntactic components according to the rules of a grammar.
- 7.
Lucien Tesnière (1893–1954), a French linguist and specialist in Slavic languages, is the author of two books: Esquisse d’une syntaxe structurale (1953) and Elements de syntaxe structurale (1959). Certain concepts advanced in these works, like valence and dependency structure, inspired several models of formal linguistics and of MT in France, in the USA, and in the countries of the Soviet Bloc.
- 8.
Garvin contrasted the heuristic method with the algorithmic method. The algorithmic method is deterministic and complete. It takes into account all the instructions necessary to get from one point to another and leads necessarily to the result. On the contrary, Garvin recommended a heuristic method, which is more of an assistance to discover the result than a direct way to reach it, for example, by resorting to arbitrary choices or learning based on trial and error.
- 9.
Maurice Gross (1934–2001) was a pioneer in MT in France. He also worked with Chomsky at MIT and Harris at the University of Pennsylvania during the early 1960s. He played an important role in disseminating information on formal grammars in France and largely contributed to spreading Harris’s works and integrating them into French linguistics (see Chaps. 8 and 9).
- 10.
Peters and Ritchie argue that transformational grammars are too powerful, insofar as they generate all kinds of languages, including nonrecursive languages. The problem originates in the fact that these grammars apply their derivation rules an unlimited number of times, in particular for short sentences. One result of this study is to show that the linguists’ intuition, according to which natural languages are recursive, is empirically founded.
- 11.
Post’s canonical systems (1943) belong to research from the 1930s and 1940s, which attempted to characterise the concept of algorithm, as applied to mathematics, in a formal way. Thus Turing machines and Post’s production systems led to the same calculable functions. Devised as systems for manipulating strings of character, they comprised a triplet:
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A finite alphabet, strings set up from this alphabet, or words
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A set of initial words
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A set of rules to manipulate character strings (or production rules)
Chomsky’s rewriting rules are directly inspired by Post’s systems although, as Pullum and Scholz (2007) remarked, Chomsky never cites Post’s key technical papers. See Partee (1978, p.167–168) referring to Chomsky and Miller (1963 section 4) for a presentation of the formalisation of these rewriting systems.
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- 12.
See Marcus (1988) on this point.
- 13.
See Cori and Marandin (2001) on reciprocal borrowing between data processing and formal grammars, in particular generative grammar.
- 14.
In 1973, AMTCL was renamed Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) thus dropping the reference to MT. A bulletin, The Finite String, was created in 1964, and the association started to organise conferences that took place every 2 years. The first one took place in Denver, Colorado, in August 1963. The journal Mechanical Translation, from 1965 until 1974 (when Yngve gave up its direction), was called Mechanical Translation and Computational Linguistics. From 1974 to 1983, it was called American Journal of Computational Linguistics, and finally from 1984 onwards Computational Linguistics.
- 15.
In that period of Cold War, American works on MT were well known by Russian researchers who started their first experiments in the wake of the first demonstration of MT on an IBM computer in New York in 1954. Some Russian works were based on American phrase-structure grammars and syntactic parsers, while other methods, more original and anchored in the Russian tradition, were founded on semantic grounds (see Chap. 7 §7.1.3). Conversely, the Americans started translating Soviet works from 1957 within the Joint Publications Research Service. The Slavist Kenneth E. Harper from UCLA established a state-of-the-art survey of Soviet works, conferences and journals in 1961 (Harper 1961). However, American MT researchers did not draw inspiration from Soviet methods contrary to the French who used both American and Russian methods (see Chap. 8 §8.6). The other European countries of the Soviet bloc only started work on MT in the mid-1960s and did not develop original methods.
- 16.
According to Murray (1993), the Congress organising committee, made up of Morris Halle, William Locke, Horace Hunt and Edward Klima reserved a plenary session for Chomsky, although he was a generation younger than the four other invited speakers. Besides he was allotted four times more space in the proceedings. As for the Neo-Bloomfieldians, they boycotted the congress, acknowledging their defeat. According to Barsky (2011), Chomsky’s and Harris’ biographer, Harris gave up his plenary session to Chomsky.
- 17.
The Macy Conferences were organised by the pioneers of cybernetics, among them McCulloch and Rosenblueth, to support interdisciplinary meetings under the aegis of the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation, which was created in 1930 and was specialised in medical research. Only the last five conferences have been published.
- 18.
This term refers to the traditional opposition between “strong AI”, which holds that the machine is capable of reproducing a cognitive behaviour or simulating an organism and its relationships of adaptation to an environment, and “weak AI” which holds that the machine can simulate a fragment of “synthetic” intelligence whose composition is completely different from human intelligence, but whose result, i.e. the production of representations, is identical to what human intelligence would produce.
- 19.
It should be noted that, in 1951, Kleene showed this part of McCullough and Pitts does not hold up mathematically. Thanks to Maarten Bullynck for this remark.
- 20.
See Chap. 7 below for a full presentation of this group of MT.
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Léon, J. (2021). From MT to Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing. In: Automating Linguistics. History of Computing. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70642-5_6
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