Abstract
Automation of languages was not always associated with mathematisation. Soviet linguistics, British linguistics and French structuralist linguistics used quite different modes of integration. The way they automated translation, based on lexicon and semantics and anchored in specific linguistic and cultural traditions, gave rise to new issues, or revived old ones, allowing new objects to emerge from the language sciences. Rather than be obliged to integrate a new horizon of retrospection imposed on them from outside, within a short period of time these approaches inscribed the automation of language in long-term history. Part 1 discusses the English and Russian cases, both using intermediary language, whereas part 2 studies the French case that is built around lexis.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
“Let it be remarked parenthetically that some of my speculations in this direction attach themselves to the earlier work of Kolmogoroff in Russia, although a considerable part of my work was done before my attention was called to the work of the Russian school. [Kolmogoroff A.N. 1941 “Interpolation und extrapolation von stationären Zufälligen Folgen” Bull. Ac. Sciences USSR ser. maths 5 3–14]” (Wiener 1948, p.11).
- 3.
This point, addressed by Mindell et al. (2003), merits closer examination.
- 4.
Trojanskij’s patent and his algorithm can already be found in facsimile in Panov, Liapunov and Mukhin’s article of 1956 (p.27–34).
- 5.
In Esperanto, “o” is the noun morpheme and “–as” is the mark of present tense for verbs.
- 6.
See Léon 2007a for a detailed presentation of the CLRU works.
- 7.
Operator [:] marks a dyadic relation, for example, a transitive verb is marked by the expectation of a subject or an object. Nude has a syntax which can be considered the prefiguration of case grammar: a transitive verb is marked for a subject and an object.
- 8.
In English: Problems of Cybernetics, and Machine translation and Applied Linguistics
- 9.
Respective works were well-known on both sides of the Iron Curtain. One of the MT pioneers, D. Ju. Panov, attended the first computer demonstration of MT in New York. Russian works on MT or information retrieval were systematically translated by an American service, the Joint Publication Research Service (JPRS) as soon as 1956.
- 10.
See Archaimbault and Léon (1997).
- 11.
In these examples, aspect and gender are grammatical features that can potentially be expressed in a language or a group of languages. They are called potentialities.
- 12.
“[…]un modèle Sens-Texte est une machine virtuelle qui prend en entrée des (représentations de) sens d’énoncés et retourne en sortie un ensemble de Textes, qui contient toutes les paraphrases permettant d’exprimer le Sens donné en entrée” Polguère (1998, p. 4).
- 13.
“La correspondance Sens-Texte est toujours envisagée sous l’angle de la synthèse — du Sens au Texte — plutôt que sous celui de l’analyse — du Texte au Sens. La raison en est que seule la modélisation de la synthèse linguistique permet de mettre en jeu les connaissances purement linguistiques (contenues dans le dictionnaire et la grammaire de la langue). L’analyse, elle, ne peut se faire sans que l’on soit confronté au problème de la désambiguïsation, problème qui ne peut être résolu (par le locuteur ou par une modélisation formelle) sans le recours à des heuristiques basées sur des connaissances extra-linguistiques” (Polguère 1998, p. 4).
- 14.
Concerning this horizon of projection, Ju. D. Apresjan’s work on componential semantics should be mentioned.
- 15.
For a survey on the importance of statistical studies in French linguistics, see Léon and Loiseau (eds) (2017).
- 16.
Bernard Pottier, a semanticist and Hispanist, was the only linguist, with his colleague Guy Bourquin, who was directly involved in practical MT projects. Most notably he founded the MT Centre of Nancy in 1960.
- 17.
“Lexies are of different types. (A) grouping of nominal elements. The resultative functional value is that of the highest level element: ‘plaque tournante’: S + A = S″ (Pottier 1962a, p.64).
- 18.
Emile Benveniste was a major French twentieth-century linguist, a specialist in Indo-European languages and comparative grammar and above all a pioneer in Enunciation theory. He was not directly involved in MT projects but took part in committees evaluating French MT projects.
- 19.
In the 1950s, Bar-Hillel (1955) was one of the few researchers outside France to raise the issue of the automatic translation of idioms. He addressed cases in which the number of units forming the compound varies across languages and in which meaning cannot be translated unequivocally. Regardless of any linguistic conception of lexis, his only suggestion was to build an idiom dictionary.
- 20.
Linguistics is not represented at all in this congress, reflecting that it played a specific role in the human sciences in the middle of the 1960s. In addition, heated debates opposed structuralist linguists to the supporters of information retrieval and universal semantic categories such as Gardin (see Chap. 9).
- 21.
Auroux (2009) distinguishes formalisation from mathematisation. He puts forward two definitions of formalisation: (i) formalisation in the strict sense of the term, that is, “formatting”, “application of a form that language does not possess”, does not involve mathematisation; (ii) in the specific sense of the term, formalisation can be defined as “the action of representing objects by a literal system that is not necessarily unequivocal”. He glosses “literal” in the following way: “It is not in fact necessary that it should be a “letter” : A could be replaced by “suitcase”, B by “terror” and G by “emptiness”, but in order for substitution to mean something, it would be necessary to delete any meaning or to use words functioning as variables (such as “truc”, “machin”, “chose”). The use of letters originates from the use of alphabetic writing. Formalisation does not exist in oral societies” (Auroux 2009, note 11 p.25). See also the notion of weak formalisation put forward by Auroux (1998) – note 12, Chap. 4 in this volume.
See also Nefdt (2019, p. 1672) for a reflection on the difference between formalisation and mathematisation.
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Léon, J. (2021). Machine Translation of Semantics and Lexicon: New Issues and New Objects in the Long-Term History of the Language Sciences. In: Automating Linguistics. History of Computing. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70642-5_7
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