Data processing: speech signal processing – linguistics – language – Linguistics – Translation machine
Reexamination Certificate
1998-12-18
2001-08-14
Edouard, Patrick N. (Department: 2747)
Data processing: speech signal processing, linguistics, language
Linguistics
Translation machine
C704S002000
Reexamination Certificate
active
06275789
ABSTRACT:
COPYRIGHT NOTIFICATION
Portions of this patent application contain materials that are subject to copyright protection. The copyright owner has no objection to the facsimile reproduction by anyone of the patent document or the patent disclosure, as it appears in the Patent and Trademark Office patent file or records, but otherwise reserves all copyright rights whatsoever.
TECHNICAL FIELD
Method to improve international and other communication and to provide easier access to digitized data, and apparatus to perform the method. In particular, the present invention provides a means for generating linked alternative languages from a source language. More particularly, the linked alternative language systems taught by the present invention provide especially designed language forms which may be optimized in any of a variety of ways (for example, by rendering a linked alternative language easier to comprehend or by adding mnemonic features), but which has also been carefully designed to retain full bi-directional machine translation equivalence to the source language generally, and to other target languages within certain constrained contextual environments. Implications of the linked alternative language system touch upon many aspects of communication, information management, and human interface with machines.
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
The speed and facility of international communication has greatly increased in past decades, but the content of that communication is still encoded in language forms that make access to that data difficult for a vast majority of the world's population. There has long been an identified need for translation systems that would allow easier access to digitized information.
Much of the world's communication has recently come to depend on the use of the English language, and many of those using English are by no means native speakers. This presents several problems. Among these are:
1) It requires a great amount of time, and thus investment of resources, to teach a person to use English effectively.
2) English has various dialects and national forms.
3) When persons from diverse linguistics cultures who know English only as a second language try to communicate, serious problems often occur.
There is no language spoken by more than a small minority of the world population. Mandarin Chinese, the most widely spoken, is limited in geographic distribution and by a complex written form. Projections vary on the growth of language communities, but it appears that several languages are growing at rates more rapid than English. Thus the linguistic dimension of international communication is likely to remain a barrier—even as mechanical means find solutions to the physical obstacles.
Many aspects of worldwide communication are being rapidly expanded by new technologies, while other aspects lag far behind. The bulk of material in digital form is growing and the use of optical character recognition (OCR) systems and methods of scanning handwriting are making digitalization easier. Much digitalization is however still done by keyboard and with a QWERTY keyboard layout, an arrangement which was intentionally designed to be slow so that mechanical typewriter keys would not stick. The need to ease and to speed the input of digital information has been dramatized by the development of the Internet.
The quality of human to machine interface is becoming an important consideration in many fields. The need for error-free data exchange has become urgent, for mistakes can mean the loss of lives. The technology for “text to voice” operations is rapidly developing, but quality output is prevented by linguistics systems that do not allow an exact correspondence between the two.
The field of Machine Translation (MT) has attracted considerable attention since the late 1940's. Translation by human intervention is slow and expensive, and the quality of the output is difficult to gauge unless one already knows both languages well. By the early 1950's, it was hoped that MT would be able to provide a fully reliable and quicker alternative; the dream was that a computer could be supplied with a digitized text in a source language (SL) like English and automatically render it into a chosen target language (TL) such as Russian.
During the 1950's and 1960's, much of the effort in this field took place in the United States or Russia, with considerable funding from the two governments in the context of the Cold War. Techniques applied to MT in both areas soon went beyond the simple provision of word-by-word translations and contextual analysis to choose among terms, and included various techniques for the parsing of sentences to gain additional information on content from the sentence structure as well as from the individual words.
By the mid-1960's, there was also considerable debate on the values of establishing a universal “pivot-language” to reduce the number of MT processes that would be needed for global communication. Such an idea had been recommended at a 1952 conference at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The idea was that some one language could be chosen into which all potential source languages might be automatically translated; then from that pivot-language, texts could be automatically generated into any target language, saving much effort in the design of systems.
There were those who suggested using a natural language for this purpose (some early Soviet studies used Russian). Others suggested using an artificial language such as Esperanto. Dr. Alexander Gode in 1954 suggested for this purpose “Interlingua,” a project that had been developed under his editorship. Soon other researchers were developing complex pivot-languages of various types that were coded in numbers or logical symbols; e.g., I. A. Melchuk in the Soviet Union during the 1960's. But it was discovered that translations to and from such artificial languages were also fraught with error.
By 1959, Bar-Hillel had already shown that “Fully Automatic High Quality Translation” between two natural languages was intrinsically impossible by machine. But it was a U.S. government report in 1966, the ALPAC Report, that highlighted the limitations of MT techniques and ultimately brought an end to U.S. government funding for MT. Research did continue in the Soviet Union and in Japan (and to a reduced degree elsewhere).
Interest in the MT field was revived in Europe in 1977, with the European Community commissioning work on MT. One such project, begun in 1979, was named DLT (Distributed Language Translation) and used Esperanto as its pivot language. The company was the Bureau for Systems Development (BSO) in Utrecht, Netherlands. Early DLT funding came from the European Community; in 1984, there was a grant of US$ 3.5 million from the Dutch government. By the early 1990's, however, the DLT project was over, not having produced the desired results.
Many more recent MT methodologies rely heavily on sequential word frequency considerations and probability databases. Such methods are more likely to produce readable output, since by nature they recreate word sequences that are not only possible but common in the target language. But this very fact is an extremely serious threat to users, who may be seduced into believing in the accuracy of a text by its very normalcy. By their nature, such methods will produce output that is likely to appear very credible, even though full of mistakes. Furthermore, the user has no way to verify the accuracy of such output—unless the user has access to someone who knows both the source and target language and can confirm accuracy and/or make corrections. The fact remains that traditional MT techniques can only approximate the needed translation; and by their nature they must logically remain prone to introducing dangerous errors into the communication process.
In the field of linguistics, there has been a long series of efforts to create artificial languages that would be superior to natural ones. Descartes and Leibniz were among the earlie
Moser Leo
Moser Robert
Edouard Patrick N.
LaRiviere Grubman & Payne, LLP
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