Newsletter of the International Association for Machine Translation

ISSN 0965-5476 Issue no.1 January 1992

In this issue:

* Association news (IAMT, AMTA, EAMT, JAMT)

* Conference reports

* Programmes, policies, surveys

* New products

* Research developments

* Recent publications

* Conference announcement (TMI-92)

* Forthcoming events

Editor-in-Chief:

John Hutchins, The Library, University of East Anglia, Norwich NR4 7TJ, United Kingdom. Fax: +44 (603) 259490; Email: L101@uk.ac.uea

Assistant editors:

AMTA: Dr.Joseph E. Pentheroudakis, Executive Communication Systems, Inc., 455 N.University, Suite 202, Provo, Utah 84601, USA. Fax: +1 (801) 374-6292; Email: pentherj@edu.utah.cc, or: ecs@yvax.byu.edu

EAMT: Dr.Tom C. Gerhardt, CRP-CU/CRETA, 13 rue de Bragance, L-1255 Luxembourg. Fax: +352 (44) 73 52; Email: tom@crpculu.uucp

JAMT: Professor Hirosato Nomura, Kyushu Institute of Technology, Iizuka, 820 Japan. Fax: +81 (948) 29-760; Email: nomura@dumbo.ai.kyutech.ac.jp

Publisher: Praetorius Ltd., 5 East Circus Street, Nottingham NG1 5AH, UK.

This newsletter has been founded for the exchange of information and opinions about machine translation (MT). It is open to all with any interest in this increasingly important field: users (actual and potential), manufacturers and vendors, sponsors and supporters, researchers and developers, and any others who want to know what is going on and what the future may bring. This first issue is necessarily larger than later ones are expected to be, primarily because it carries essential information about the foundation of the International Association for Machine Translation (IAMT) and the regional associations, AMTA, EAMT and JAMT. But it is larger also because it reports on MT activity for much of the past year.

It is intended that MT News International will appear initially three times a year in the months of January, May and September. It will carry regular features reflecting the varied interests and approaches of the expected readership: news of activities by the associations, reports of new products from manufacturers, research developments, new installations of systems, users' comments and opinions, and reports of conferences, seminars and workshops devoted to or related to MT. It will inform readers about programmes, innovations, policies, financial support and sponsorships by and for national and international (governmental and non-governmental) organizations and institutions. It will report on surveys of MT activity, evaluations of systems, and assessments of the MT market, and of course it will include notices of recent publications (books, journals and reports) and a calendar of forthcoming events. It is hoped that a lively correspondence section will develop, where in particular users of systems (regular, occasional or just potential, and whether translators or non-translators, companies or individuals) will express their views and needs, hopes and disappointments.

A major goal of IAMT and of MT News International is to provide access to impartial information about systems. It will seek to maintain a balance of views and opinions and not become the exclusive organ for any one particular interest or persuasion.

Above all, it is hoped that this newsletter will enable open and frank communication between all those with an interest in MT in all its various forms.

Contributions to MT News International should be sent to the Assistant Editors in the regional associations or directly to the Editor-in-Chief at the addresses given on the left (and whenever possible in electronic form). Items for inclusion in the section on 'Recent publications' should be sent to the Editor-in-Chief, who thanks all those who have already responded to requests. He is also most grateful to Sarah Mortimer of Mitaka (Leamington Spa, UK) for translating excerpts from the JAMT Journal.

Copies of the newsletter are distributed by each regional association to their members, and enquiries about obtaining copies should be addressed to the relevant secretariats (as given elsewhere in this issue). At some future date it is hoped that the newsletter will be available in electronic form on an appropriate network as well as appearing in its present printed form. Comments and suggestions on any aspect or feature of MT News International will be welcomed by the editors.

The International Association for Machine Translation (IAMT) was established last July on the occasion of the Third Machine Translation Summit Meeting (MT Summit III) in Washington D.C. It aims at bringing together users, developers, researchers, sponsors, and other individuals or institutional or corporate entities interested in machine translation (MT) for the purpose of promoting and fostering, by every available means, the development and active use of MT systems. The IAMT offers opportunities and occasions to exchange information, study MT technologies and applications, and discuss and establish reference criteria or standards in areas of common interest to its members.

In 1987 the first MT Summit meeting was held at Hakone in Japan, where it was clearly recognized that the exchange of experience, information and opinions among users, developers, researchers, and government people who support the activities of MT is of great value for the development and wider use of MT systems. From this experience we organized the International Forum on MT at Oiso in Japan in 1989, the MT Summit II in Munich in 1989, and the MT Summit III in Washington D.C. in 1991. Those who attended these conferences expressed the wish to have an association for the exchange of information and for discussing the various problems of MT. The idea was discussed at MT Summit II, and finally at MT Summit III we established IAMT and at the same time three regional associations: the European Association for Machine Translation (EAMT), the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas (AMTA), and the Japan Association for Machine Translation (JAMT). JAMT is making an effort to extend its activities to other Asian countries and to form an Asian Association for Machine Translation in the near future.

The activities of IAMT will include the publication of newsletters, the organization of the MT Summits, workshops on a variety of topics, symposia, tutorials and others events, proposals for standards, and it will serve as a clearinghouse for current information on MT. This MT News International is the first issue of the IAMT newsletter. Since the IAMT was established only a few months ago, we have still no significant activities of our own, but we are endeavouring to give good service to members of the association. It has already been decided that the Fourth MT Summit will take place in Kobe, Japan, in July 1993; and we are planning the formation of some technical committees, such as one on the evaluation of MT systems. We shall welcome any ideas, proposals and comments you may have for the promotion of IAMT activity. I hope that our activities will be valuable to all members, and that all people with any interest in the field of MT will join the association, whether users, developers, manufacturers, vendors, researchers, translators and any others from whatever background who wish to contribute to the furtherance of machine translation.

The first general membership meeting of the International Association for Machine Translation, held on 4 July 1991 as part of the final day's programme of MT Summit III, represented the culmination of more than two years of preparatory activity.

The idea of an international association bringing together people interested in all aspects of MT was first voiced in April 1989 at the International Forum on Translation Technology in Oiso, Japan, and was reiterated by Professor Makoto Nagao in his keynote address later that same year at MT Summit II in Munich. Shortly thereafter a prospectus setting forth the Association's purpose and the basic principles by which it would be guided was drafted by Makoto Nagao working in collaboration with Veronica Lawson and Muriel Vasconcellos.

The challenge was to form an institution that would be truly international and at the same time strong and active at the local level. The Drafting Committee felt that this dual aim could be accomplished most effectively through the simultaneous creation of three regional associations -- in the Americas, Asia, and Europe -- which would be woven, in turn, into a worldwide structure that would be tied to the biennial MT Summits. At all levels the work of the Associations would give equal honour to MT researchers, commercial developers, and current or prospective users. Above all, the Associations would be democratic. The prospectus incorporating these principles was announced and circulated in Washington, D.C., on 7 December 1989 at the Symposium on Japanese-to-English Machine Translation.

Over the next 18 months initiatives got under way in the Americas, Europe, and Japan--the last of which is now being coordinated with a pan-Asian group. Thus, by the time MT Summit III rolled around in July 1991, each of the three regional associations was in place and each had been able to hold its first meetings and elect its respective members of the international Council.

At the first meeting of the Council, held on 3 July, Makoto Nagao was elected president; Margaret King, vice-president and president-elect; Muriel Vasconcellos, secretary; and Roberta Merchant, treasurer. John Hutchins was appointed editor-in-chief of the newsletter; he will collaborate with regional editors Joseph Pentheroudakis (Americas) and Tom Gerhardt (Europe) and be assisted by Geoffrey Kingscott. It was agreed that the work of the IAMT secretariat will be divided between the regions: the Americas will provide administrative support, with IAMT to be registered as a corporation in Washington, D.C.; Europe will be responsible for information, including both the newsletter and a clearinghouse; and Asia will coordinate planning and programming. Membership in IAMT will normally be through the regional associations, each of which will contribute 10% of its dues to the international treasury. English is the official language of IAMT. It was decided to make the newsletter available in electronic form to the three regions, which in turn will assume responsibility for hard-copy dissemination.

Against this background, the general membership meeting was called to order by Professor Nagao at 2:15 p.m. on 4 July. Secretary Muriel Vasconcellos reviewed the main decisions of the Council and summarized the highlights of the American and European initiatives to date. Whereupon Makoto Nagao declared that IAMT had officially come into being.

Summary of the IAMT constitution and officers.

The charter of IAMT envisages the following activities:

(a) the collection and compilation of information by serving as a repository for historical and current documentation on MT, converting the texts to machine-readable form when and as feasible.

(b) the exchange of information by serving as a clearinghouse for current information of interest to MT users and developers, e.g. for users: translation market trends, available MT systems, types of MT applications, introduction of MT systems, approaches to text file input, pre- and postediting strategies, evaluation of MT, etc.; and for developers: theories of MT, MT technologies, improvement of MT, approaches to dictionary-building, data bases and other files available for exchange, etc.

(c) the dissemination of information, by publication of a regular Newsletter on MT, an MT handbook (including agreed definitions of terminology) and bibliographies

(d) the development of reference criteria and standards in such areas as: common document format for MT input, exchange format for dictionaries, design of controlled language, evaluation of MT output and MT systems

The IAMT has three categories of membership: individual, corporate, and institutional. There are at present three Regional Associations (for the Americas, Europe and Japan), whose members are automatically members of IAMT. Regional Associations have their own boards and carry out their own activities in addition to participating in those of the IAMT. The supreme governing body of IAMT is its General Assembly, convened in conjunction with the MT Summit. The IAMT Council executes decisions of the General Assembly and carries out IAMT business; it will have ten members, three representatives from each regional association and the Editor-in-Chief of the newsletter. From its ranks it will elect a President, a Vice President, a Secretary, and a Treasurer. The office of President will rotate every two years between the three Regional Associations. The Editorial Board of the IAMT Newsletter is composed of three editors, one from each Regional Association designated by the respective Regional Board, plus the Editor-in-Chief designated by the IAMT Council.

The IAMT will convene the MT Summit every two years, rotating between the three regions. The Association will also: sponsor and support workshops, symposia, and conferences on MT and related technologies and applications, organize tutorials and training courses on MT applications and skills involved in the use of MT and on MT technologies, and establish technical committees, special interest groups, and study teams.

Officers of IAMT:

President: Professor Makoto Nagao (JAMT)

Vice President: Dr.Margaret King (EAMT)

Secretary: Dr. Muriel Vasconcellos (AMTA)

Treasurer: Roberta Merchant

Editor-in-Chief: John Hutchins

The following is an extended excerpt from an open letter by Muriel Vasconcellos, AMTA president, included in the Association's first membership drive

Dear Colleague:

I am writing you to invite you to join the new Association for Machine Translation in the Americas (AMTA).

This initiative is now a reality, and it is an idea whose time has come. Machine translation is at long last beginning to come into its own. The signs are subtle, but they are there: at MT Summit III last July, the developers and vendors of 22 working systems crowded into the Exhibit Hall and made their products do what they were supposed to do in the presence of demanding onlookers. Moreover, 11 systems were demonstrated live in a theatre-style setting. A number of them were submitted to the acid test of translating random input under public scrutiny. The fact that so many developers chose to take part in this event is testimony to the incrementally changing times: dictionaries are larger and more deeply coded, parsers are making fewer mistakes, hardware and programming languages are turning smarter and more powerful, fresh approaches are coming out of the laboratory and moving into the mainstream, and, as a result of all this, MT output is gradually becoming more reliable.

At the same time, interest in machine translation has never been greater, as the planet's economy and its safe-keeping become increasingly dependent on information. In a world where national boundaries are getting erased, information must be translated into other languages in order to sell products, advance research, maximize the earth's bounty, keep people wise and healthy, and stop wars.

Now more than ever there is need for an association devoted exclusively to machine translation--one free of other competing concerns that could concentrate its energies totally on fostering this technology. AMTA was incorporated last April in Washington, D.C., and held its first organizational meeting at the time of MT Summit III. Its purpose is to:

...bring together researchers, commercial developers, users, sponsors, and other individuals or institutional or corporate entities interested in machine translation in order to promote and foster the development and active use of machine translation systems.

In joining together individuals and institutions that approach the MT challenge from different perspectives--representatives of academia, the marketplace, and government; researchers and commercial developers; users, would-be users, and just plain watchers--AMTA's intention is to encourage new relationships, create a climate for the exchange of ideas, and give importance to all points of view. This commitment is reflected in the composition of the initial Board of Directors and in the Board's determination to perpetuate a balanced representation.

AMTA's effort in the Americas is being replicated in Europe and Asia, and the three regional associations are banding together to form the International Association for Machine Translation (IAMT), which also held its first meeting at the time of MT Summit III.

You are invited to join us in this pioneering initiative. AMTA, together with IAMT, is already looking forward to a full plate of activities. The first issue of a regular newsletter on MT activities worldwide under the able editorship of John Hutchins is scheduled to appear in January 1992. In addition, AMTA will be organizing workshops and conferences, co-sponsoring the biennial MT Summit, proposing criteria for the evaluation of MT systems, and cooperating in the exchange of "pre-competitive" data such as parallel texts and mailing lists - to mention but a few of the projects in the pipeline. Happenings planned for 1992 include a "buyers' workshop" to showcase MT systems to potential purchasers and a tutorial on MT to be offered in cooperation with the American Translators Association.

Exciting times are ahead. I hope that you will be with us as we embark on this new undertaking.

Sincerely,

Muriel Vasconcellos

President

[from the Constitution]:

a. Encourage and advance MT technologies and suitable applications thereof;

b. Share knowledge that contributes to the development and active use of MT systems, which may include the collection, compilation, exchange and dissemination of information;

c. Sponsor and support workshops, symposia, and conferences on MT and related technologies and applications;

d. Develop appropriate training materials and programs;

e. Reward excellence in machine translation;

f. Facilitate access by researchers to machine-readable corpora and cooperate in the promotion of exchange formats and text-encoding conventions;

g. Help to set priorities for MT development, avoid unnecessary duplication of effort, and provide guidance for investments in areas of highest priority; and

h. Discuss and establish reference criteria or standards in areas of common interest to its members.

AMTA registered office: 655 Fifteenth Street, N.W., Suite 310, Washington, D.C. 20005

President: Muriel Vasconcellos (Pan American Health Organization, Washington, DC). Tel: (202) 861-4338; Fax: (202) 223-5971, (202) 667-8808

Vice-president: Sergei Nirenburg (Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA). Tel: (412) 268-6593; Fax: (412) 268-6298

Secretary: Winfield Scott Bennett (Linguistics Research Center, University of Texas, Austin, TX) Tel: (512) 471-4566; Fax: (512) 471-9646

Treasurer: Roberta Merchant (U.S. Department of Defense). Tel: (301) 688-6149

Newsletter editor: Joseph Pentheroudakis (Executive Communication Systems, Inc., Provo, UT). Tel: (801) 377-1167; Fax: (801) 374-6292

Directors: Rob Billingsley (Defense Tech. Information Center), Dale Bostad (Foreign Technology Division, US Air Force), Robert M. Carswell, Jr. (Counsel), Tony Centodocati (National Science Foundation), John Chandioux (John Chandioux Experts-Conseils), Mark Eaton (Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation), Denis Gachot (Systran), Deanna Hammond (American Translators Association), Bernard Scott (Logos Corporation), Tom Seal (ALPNET), Howard Teicher (Translation Technologies International), Virginia Teller (Hunter College), Ming Tsui (Canadian Secretary of State), Yorick Wilks (New Mexico State University)

Committees and Committee Chairs

Fifteen of the 18 members of the Initial Board of Directors of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas (AMTA) met in Washington, D.C., on July 1, 1991, immediately prior to MT Summit III to conduct the Association's first business. Those present were: Scott Bennett (Siemens-Nixdorf); Rob Billingsley (U.S. Department of Defense); Robert Carswell (counsel); Tony Centodocati (U.S. National Science Foundation); John Chandioux (John Chandioux Experts-Conseils); Mark Eaton (MCC); Denis Gachot (SYSTRAN); Roberta Merchant (U.S. Department of Defense); Sergei Nirenburg (Carnegie Mellon University); Joseph Pentheroudakis (ECS); Bernard Scott (LOGOS); Howard Teicher (TOVNA); Virginia Teller (Hunter College); Ming Tsui (Canadian Secretary of State); and Muriel Vasconcellos (Pan American Health Organization).

After approving a set of provisional bylaws, the Board elected its officers, as follows: Muriel Vasconcellos, president; Sergei Nirenburg, first vice president; Scott Bennett, secretary; and Roberta Merchant, treasurer. In addition, Robert Carswell was appointed vice president for legal affairs and general counsel, and Joseph Pentheroudakis was appointed editor, to coordinate AMTA contributions to the international newsletter. The dues structure was decided on as follows: active members, US$65.00 ($50.00 for those joining prior to 1 January 1992); associate members, US$25.00; institutional (not-for-profit) members, US$200.00; and corporate (for-profit) members, $400.00.

Mandates, chairpersons, and initial membership were agreed on for the following committees: Bylaws, Ethics, Evaluation, Information, Nominations, and Program (as listed above).

At a general meeting of AMTA members, held in the late afternoon of4 July, further details of the Association's work were hammered out and the corresponding committees were expanded.

[from a circular sent to potential members]

The European Association for Machine Translation (EAMT) is a newly formed organization which seeks to bring together researchers, developers, users, sponsors, and other individuals or institutions interested in machine translation and/or computer assisted translation whatever their background. It is one of three regional associations of the International Association for Machine Translation, which was set up officially in July 1991.

The aim of EAMT is to promote and foster the development and active use of machine translation and/or computer assisted translation, and to provide a forum for the exchange of information and ideas among all those interested and involved in this technology. The association is intended to represent the views of the machine translation community as a whole, and to be the major sources for objective information about machine translation. Together with the other regional associations, EAMT will encourage research of all kinds in the field, promote the exchange of information, seek to establish reliable methods of evaluation, organize seminars, lectures, courses and workshops for users and potential purchasers of systems, and disseminate information on conferences and publications concerned with machine translation, its users and its applications.

The EAMT membership rates for 1992 will be: Individual members SFr.35.-; Non-profit making institutions SFr. 175.-; Profit making institutions SFr. 350.-

All EAMT members are automatically members of the International Association for Machine Translation, and will receive the IAMT newsletter MT News International.

[from the Articles of Association]

"The Association's purpose shall be to bring together users, developers, researchers, sponsors and others interested in the field of machine and/or computer assisted translation research, development and use.

In the pursuit of the above mentioned purpose, the Association shall in particular perform the following activities:

- promote the exchange of information on machine and/or computer assisted translation among its members.

- encourage the development of computer software in the field of machine and/or computer assisted translation.

- encourage development of models and theories related to machine and/or computer assisted translation.

- organize seminars and lectures in the field of machine and/or computer assisted translation.

- disseminate information on machine translation workshops and conferences, as well as on publications relevant to the domain.

- participate in and/or become a member of other Associations that pursue the same or similar purpose."

The supreme organ of EAMT is the General Assembly of all its members, which elects the President and members of the Executive Committee. Voting rights reflect different categories of membership (individual members have one vote, non-profit making institutions five, and profit making institutions ten). The Executive Committee is composed of the EAMT President and four members elected by the General Assembly; additional members may be co-opted with approval of the General Assembly.

A provisional executive committee was formed on 4 July 1991 with the following officers and responsibilities:

President: Margaret King (ISSCO).

Secretary: Ian Johnson (Sharp Laboratories of Europe Ltd.)

Treasurer: Doris Albisser (Union Bank of Switzerland, Zürich)

Newsletter assistant editor: Tom C.Gerhardt (CRP-CU/CRETA)

International activities: Ulrich Heid (University of Stuttgart)

Lexicography: John Hutchins (University of East Anglia)

Education: Kai Lee Hong PR activities: Karin Meichtry (Ascom Hasler Ltd.)

New activities/fund-raising: Brigitte Roudaud (B'VITAL/SITE)

IAMT representative: Ulrike Schwall (IBM Deutschland)

Newsletter representative: Sylvie Wallez (Université Liège)

Secretariat: Tamara Wehrli

Address of the EAMT Secretariat: ISSCO, 54 route des Acacias, CH-1227 Carouge, Geneva, Switzerland

Workshops planned by EAMT:

Machine Translation and Translation Theory, July 1992, Berlin (Germany). For details see 'Forthcoming events' at the end of the Newsletter.

MT & Evaluation, early October 1992, Geneva (Switzerland).

MT & Lexicon, October 1992, Heidelberg (Germany).

MT & MAT and its Users, end of 1992, Spain.

For further information please contact: Ulrike Schwall, IBM Deutschland, Institute for Knowledge Based Systems, Computational Linguistics 2, Tiergartenstrasse 15, Postfach 10 30 68, D-6900 Heidelberg, Germany

The Japan Association for Machine Translation (JAMT) was established on April 17th, 1991, and held its first general meeting on 25 July 1991.

[from the constitution]

"The purpose of JAMT is to contribute its every effort to the development of the machine translation systems in the world by

(i) establishing a common ground for the mutual exchange of any relevant information and the study and discussion of any subject common to the systems among manufacturers, users and research institutions interested in such systems,

(ii) cooperating with any academic society or institution relating to such systems in the world, and

(iii) extending its business activities to foreign countries,so as to realize the steady advancement and dispersal of such systems in society.

- JAMT shall attempt to organize an Asian association for machine translation to promote the development of the machine translation systems in Asian countries

- JAMT shall engage in the following...

(4) Technical development of MT systems.

(8) Promotion of any academic or scientific investigation and study.

The supreme body of JAMT is the General Assembly of its members.

Present officers and board members are:

President: Makoto Nagao (Kyoto University)

Vice-presidents: Kunika Mizushima (Toshiba Corporation), Taizo Kotani (Intergroup Co.Ltd.)

Directors: Atsushi Asada (Sharp Corp.), Eiichi Ohno (Mitsubishi Electric Corp.), Tatsuya Komatsu (Simul International Co.Ltd.), Takeshi Suzuki (JEIDA), Hozumi Tanaka (Tokyo Inst.Technology), Masao Toka (NEC Corp.), Yasukazu Toda (CSK Co.Ltd.), Masaya Nakajima (Matsushita Electric Industrial Co.Ltd.), Takashi Nonouchi (Hitachi Ltd.), Hirosato Nomura (Kyushu Inst. Technology), Katsuhiko Hiura (Jujirushi Co.Ltd.), Toshio Hiraguri (Fujitsu Ltd.), Masataka Yamamoto (Oki Electric Industry Co.Ltd.)

Auditors: Mihoko Katsuta (Japanese Translation Federation Inc.), Seishun Sato (JEIDA)

Committee chairmen

Steering Committee: Hiroshi Uchida (Fujitsu)

Newsletter: Hirosato Nomura

PR Planning: Hiroshi Uchida

System evaluation: Hozumi Tanaka

Finance: Akira Furusawa

Address of the secretariat: Mrs. Megumi Okita, Japan Association for Machine Translation, 305 Akasaka Chuo Mansion, 2-17, Akasaka 7-chome, Minato-ku, Tokyo 107 Tel: +81-3-3479-4396

Fax: +81-3-3479-4895

JAMT fees:

Personal member -- 1,000 yen for entry; 5,000 yen/year

Group member -- 10,000 yen or more for entry; 50,000 yen/year

Organization (MT manufacturer) -- 100,000 yen or more for entry; 500,000 yen/year.

Foundation members:

MT manufacturers: 100,000 yen for set up; 800,000 yen/year.

MT system users: 50,000 for set up; 400,000 yen/year

The committee for the JAMT journal began in April 1991 with the foundation of JAMT itself, with Hirosato Nomura as chairman.

There are eight members, three from large translation companies, four from large computer companies and one (the chairman) from a university. It is intended that the JAMT Journal will include: essays on translation and machine translation, introductory articles on MT/NLP technologies, essays on MT experiences from individual users, from organizations, and from translators, introductions to MT/NLP research/development institutions, panel discussions on Translation/MT from the viewpoints of research, development, market, administration, etc., news on relevant activities, information on conferences/meetings, news of MT related projects from over the world, information on new MT products, views from JAMT member, etc. JAMT Journal appears every other month, with the first issue appearing on 25 July 1991.

Contents of the first three issues are listed in 'Recent publications'.

The third MT Summit took place from 1st to 4th July 1991 in the elegant surroundings of the Mayflower Hotel, Washington, D.C. The conference was ensured of success by the excellent organization of Sergei Nirenburg and his colleagues from the Center for Machine Translation of Carnegie-Mellon University, Pittsburgh, with local arrangements in the capable hands of Muriel Vasconcellos. Nearly 400 registered for the conference, with a particularly strong participation from Japan.

The first day was devoted to 'executive briefings' (intended primarily for participants unfamiliar with the field.) Harold Somers and John Hutchins provided a general overview of the basic issues in MT research, including a brief history, an outline of basic system design, practical aspects (pre- and post-editing, interactive use, etc.), and the major linguistic aspects of analysis and representation, ambiguity, contrastive lexical and grammatical problems and stylistic considerations. They were followed by a joint presentation by Zenshiro Kawasaki and Joann Ryan on how MT can be successfully integrated into document production services of organizations. The various options were covered, from submitting disks to a service bureau utilizing MT to purchasing or leasing a system for internal use, with guidelines for selecting appropriate systems and for cost-effective utilization. In the afternoon, Jaime Carbonell and Sergei Nirenburg described the knowledge-based approach to MT system design, dealing with the kind of knowledge required for translation and the necessary computational architecture, processing algorithms, methods of syntactic and semantic analysis and target text generation. They were followed by Makoto Nagao describing the current situation in Japan, the systems developed and available, and the practical use of systems.

The conference proper opened on 2nd July with speeches from Jaime Carbonell (general chairman) and Makoto Nagao, followed by accounts of Eurotra by Jörg Schütz and others and of the LMT project at IBM by Mori Rimon and others and two panel discussions. The first devoted to 'the MT user experience' covered recent developments in Meteo (John Chandioux), at PAHO (Muriel Vasconcellos), at Logos (Bernard Scott), at the Japan Broadcasting Corporation (NHK) in the use of systems for subtitles and news services (Hideki Tanaka), and at the US Defense Technical Information Center using Systran (Rob Billingsley). The second panel was devoted to 'building the customer base', with presentations by Michel Gainet (United Nations), Muriel Jerome-O'Keeffe (CACI), Edith Losa (Stromberg-Carlson), Maria Martinez-Perez (IBM Spain), Sue Walker-Toledo (Netrologic), and Michael Zarechnak (Georgetown University). The afternoon of the first day concluded with papers on the Ultra experiment at New Mexico State University, research on semantics for interlingua-based MT at the Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation, and the corpus- and statistics-based ArchTran system for English-Chinese translation under development in Taiwan.

The second day continued with presentations of research systems and projects and a further three panel sessions. Many of the presentations were given in parallel sessions, presenting difficult choices for conference participants. They covered developments of existing commercial systems (Siemens' METAL, NEC's PIVOT, Toshiba's AS-TRANSAC), and a wide range and variety of experimental projects: translation of avalanche bulletins at ISSCO, bilingual lexica at Cambridge University, the ALT J/E under development at NTT, the KIELIKONE translation workstation for Finnish, the translator's workbench project at Triumph-Adler, another paper on the Ultra project and three further presentations of the research work at Carnegie-Mellon University (the knowledge-based MT system KANT, 'memory-based' MT for the SNAP parallel processor, and the JANUS speech translation system). A marked feature was the large number of systems involving Japanese and English, under development in both Japan and the United States.

The three panel sessions on the second day were devoted to international perspectives, the respective roles of translators and MT, and the evaluation of systems. In the first panel session, two speakers reported on the changing attitudes to MT in the United States (Deanna Hammond from the perspective of the American Translators' Association and from her experience in US federal agencies, and Clark Wayne from the viewpoint of the US Department of Defense). There are clearly strong prospects of more substantial support for MT research than in the recent past, with an emphasis on the exploration of the newer AI, statistical and corpus-based approaches, on integration with other text handling systems, and on realistic evaluations of performance. Nick Ostler summarized the UK position, emphasising the importance of the 'language industries' market in the European Communities and the perhaps relatively smaller role of MT research in this context. Jan-Michel Czermak concentrated on the important contribution of German research in the Eurotra project and summarized the findings of the SCS study (reported elsewhere in this issue). The two Japanese participants were Watanabe, who reported on activity at the Japan Information Center of Science and Technology (particularly the development of the Mu system), and Makoto Nagao, who spoke about the multi-national CICC project (involving Japan, China, Thailand and Indonesia).

The second panel of the day was entitled 'Where do translators fit into Machine Translation?' Claude Bédard argued for more realistic tools for translators, which actually save them time and effort; Harold Hille (United Nations) advocated closer collaboration between translators and researchers, while not abandoning the ultimate FAHQT goal; Martin Kay (Xerox Corporation) was doubtful about the benefits of present systems, believing that they were more often hindrances than aids for translators; Fred Klein maintained that MT developers had ignored the real needs of practising translators and that extravagant and false claims were antagonising potential supporters; Sergei Nirenburg (Carnegie-Mellon University) also advocated greater involvement of translators in MT research of all kinds; and Pierre Isabelle wanted MT research to tackle what human translators found difficult and not what they found easy (such as pronouns and anaphora). A common theme of all presenters was that MT researchers should aim to satisfy real needs and not be concerned with 'interesting' academic problems. The panel was chaired by Alex Gross who proposed a code of ethics to which MT developers should subscribe.

The third panel was devoted to the 'evaluation of MT systems' chaired by Margaret King (ISSCO) who introduced the session with a succinct overview of the factors involved, based in large part on discussions at the Evaluators' Forum in April 1991 (reported elsewhere in this issue.) Yorick Wilks (New Mexico State University) was highly skeptical of the usefulness of evaluation, either to researchers and developers or to potential purchasers; he was particularly doubtful about the very possibility of independent 'test suites' as opposed to evaluations in specific environments with real texts. Sture Allen (Gothenburg University) and Ulrich Heid (Stuttgart University) outlined what sponsors and developers, respectively, expect to learn from evaluations of systems, with modularity and extensibility identified as the most problematic features to assess. Doris Albisser (Union Bank of Switzerland) concluded the session with a prospective customer's view, distinguishing linguistic, technical, organizational aspects and not forgetting the corporate situation of the MT supplier (e.g. its financial stability, resources for system development, and the level of customer support).

The final day of the conference comprised a further two panel sessions and the inaugural meeting of the International Association for Machine Translation (reported elsewhere in this issue.) The first of the panels was devoted to future developments in research: brief descriptions were given by Peter Brown of the statistics-based approach at IBM, by Akira Kurematsu of the speech translation research at ATR, by Hozumi Tanaka of the multilingual CICC project, by Jaime Carbonell of the knowledge-based MT research at Carnegie-Mellon University, and by Masaru Tomita of his plans for training Japanese students in efficient use of existing MT systems. The last panel was entitled 'applications of MT technologies'. Rod Johnson (IDSIA) and Lori Levin (Carnegie-Mellon University) both advocated the use of MT technology in the development of systems for computer-assisted language learning; Yorick Wilks described work on automatic extraction of lexical data from dictionaries; Richard Kittredge (Montreal University) described research on the generation of multi- lingual texts directly from databanks, i.e. mapping from structured data onto well-defined sublanguages; Hiroshi Uchida (Fujitsu) described the EDR project; Steven Weinstein (Reuters) described the Topic Identification System, which 'skims' texts for 'interesting' news, with the possibility in the future of generating stories in many languages and thus providing translations of summarized texts; Ian Richardson (IBM Microsoft) outlined the prospects of integrating MT and grammar checkers for authoring-translating systems; and finally Pierre Isabelle spoke about work in Canada on a translator's workstation.

As a diversion from these presentations, the conference provided an opportunity for the delegates to view the latest wares of the MT manufacturers and the latest developments of the research groups. All the well-known names were present: Catena Resource, CICC, ECS, EDR, Eurotra, Fujitsu, Hitachi, Linguistic Products, Logos, Mitsubishi, NEC, New Mexico State University, NTT, Oki, Sharp, Siemens, Systran, Toshiba, TTI (Tovna); and some less well known: Concern Data (with a system for translating into Russian), Intergraph (which has taken over and re-packaged the Weidner MacroCAT system), and Socatra (demonstrating its XLT translation service).

Anyone who was not at the conference can purchase the proceedings from the organizers at US$40.00 per copy. Orders with a check should be mailed to: Barbara Moore, Center for Machine Translation, 109 Smith Hall, 5000 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15217, USA.

The fourth MT Summit conference will take place in 1993 in Japan. Plans have already begun and this newsletter will report on progress from time to time.

Evaluators' Forum, Les Rasses, Switzerland, April 1991.

In April of 1991, the International Working Group on Evaluation of Machine Translation Systems (a small working party formed during the Austin, Texas, conference on Theoretical and Methodological Issues in Machine Translation in 1990) organized a four day "Evaluators' Forum" to discuss informally evaluation techniques.

The Forum attracted some 40 participants, representing MT users as well as academic and industrial developers of not yet commercialized MT systems, who came form Japan and from North America as well as from Europe. With a single exception, vendors of already commercialized systems were, sadly, conspicuous by their absence.

The primary purpose of the event was to provide people involved in evaluation with a forum for the exchange of experience and of views on effective evaluation techniques. The discussion was therefore structured around critical presentations of particular methodologies or techniques. On the basis of short contributions submitted before the meeting by the participants, this gave the following main themes:

1. Aspects of overall acceptability of an MT system

2. Reports on some actual evaluations

3. Types of test material

4. Intelligibility, fidelity and other aspects of adequacy of translations

5. Approaches to error analysis

6. Test suites and standard test approaches.

A role-playing exercise served as a way to sum up the discussions: groups of participants tried to determine what the best evaluation strategy would be in a variety of different environments.

Most of the participants seemed to feel that the meeting had been both enjoyable and fruitful, and a second meeting was tentatively scheduled for late January of 1993. Most of the participants also agreed to supply fuller versions of their contributions. These are currently being collated, and will appear as a technical report in the near future.

Anybody interested either in obtaining a copy of this report or in receiving information on the second meeting when it becomes available should contact: Kirsten Falkedal, ISSCO, 54 route des Acacias, CH-1227 Carouge, Geneva, Switzerland.

The 1991 Nordic Computational Linguistics Conference was held on the spectacular campus of the University of Bergen in Norway from the 28th to the 30th of November 1991. This gathering regularly attracts linguists and researchers from Iceland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland and, in 1991, from as far away as the United States. This year the meeting was organized jointly by the Norwegian Center for Research in the Humanities (NAVF) at the University of Bergen, and by the University's Linguistics and Computer Science Departments.

Bente Maegaard, Director of the Center for Language Technology at the University of Copenhagen, opened the conference with an overview of the state of the art in the field and an encouraging discussion of the applications that can flow from research in the area. Machine translation was, of course, a distinguished application; in fact, Bente Maegaard was in charge of the Eurotra team at the University of Copenhagen.

Additionally, however, readers of the newsletter will be delighted to know that of the 27 papers presented at the conference, 9 were on MT and related topics, and that two MT systems were demonstrated at the University during the conference. Lars Ahrenberg of Linköping University in Sweden presented a paper on the use of interlingual text representations in machine translation and multilingual text generation in a system implemented at Linköping and used to describe complex devices and their parts in Swedish and English. Björn Beskow of Uppsala University discussed the unification based transfer in the MULTRA system, an interactive support system for translation and writing under development within the 'Multilingual Support for Translators and Writers' project at Uppsala. The dictionary work for this project, which has Swedish as the source language and English, French, and German as the target languages, was discussed by Annette Østling.

Margrethe H. Møller and Ellen Christoffersen presented their work on the translation of noun phrases from German to Danish, carried out as part of the METAL system's German-Danish project. Joseph Pentheroudakis, of ECS, Inc., in Provo, Utah, discussed some of the development-time limitations in building a machine translation system; ECS's LFG-based Machine Translation Toolkit is installed at the University of Bergen as part of the school's MANTRA project. Gudrun Magnusdottir, of Göteborg University, discussed some of the theoretical issues in evaluating machine translation systems, an area in which she has been working for some time now with Margaret King at Geneva. Eva Wikholm (Uppsala University) spoke on translation theory and machine translation.

Roald Skarsten (University of Bergen) and Magnar Brekke, formerly at the University of Bergen and currently at the Norwegian Business School in Bergen, presented the results of the ENTRA project, which involved the computer-assisted translation of several thousand words of petroleum industry texts from English to Norwegian; their results, showing that MT can indeed cut the cost of translation, will be of interest to developers and users alike.

Finally, Helge Dyvik (Department of Linguistics, University of Bergen) presented a paper on linguistics and machine translation, discussing the pivotal role of linguistics in the development of machine translation systems. Helge Dyvik also showed his own unification-based research MT system during the demonstration sessions; the interlingua-based system works between English-Swedish and Swedish-English, and Swedish-Norwegian and Norwegian-Swedish.

The proceedings of the conference will be published. The next Nordic Computational Linguistics Conference will take place in the spring of 1993 at Stockholm University.

[from JAMT Journal issue no.1, July 1991]

The Taiwan MT Workshop promoted by the National Tsing Hua University took place on 25th-26th May 1991. Scott Bennett, a researcher in MT from the University of Texas, USA, Masaru Tomita of Carnegie-Mellon University and I were invited to give lectures. Keh-Yih Su of the National Tsing Hua University led the collaboration with business to develop the ArchTran English-Chinese MT system. This is the first commercial system in the world. It gives probability scores for grammar rules, etc. with the aim of getting rid of ambiguities. Because of this study, it excels in creating appropriate text. It seems that there are 10 researchers in natural language processing and MT in Taiwan.

The 1991 conference of the American Translators Association (ATA) was held in Salt Lake City, from October 16th to the 19th. Thanks to the efforts of Muriel Vasconcellos, Chair of the ATA's Committee on Machine Translation and president of the AMTA, several MT developers and vendors exhibited at the conference: Logos, METAL, ECS, and InterGraph were all there, welcoming streams of interested participants to their booths.

Logos Corporation has ported their system to the SUN SPARCstation, taking advantage of the increased interest in workstation environments. According to Charles Cramer, an interface with Interleaf has been developed, along with interfaces with WordPerfect and FrameMaker. The language pairs that Logos supports are English to French, Spanish, German and Italian (forthcoming), and from German to English, French and Italian.

InterGraph showed their ever-improving DP/Translator, which can now translate CAD/CAM files created under the InterGraph system as well as under third party systems. InterGraph's system includes English to French, German, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese, German to English, and French to English. InterGraph was represented by Tom Reutter and Jacqueline Hannibal, members of the development and customer support staff, and by Ghassan Haddad, manager of the company's translation division.

ECS demonstrated the ECS MT Toolkit, a language-independent programming environment used to implement machine translation systems; the toolkit has been used to develop English-Chinese, English-Japanese, English-Korean and Korean-English, and is currently used by the University of Bergen's MANTRA project to develop a bidirectional English-Norwegian system. ECS also demonstrated its English-Korean bidirectional system as it is integrated in TACCIMS (Theater Automated Command and Control Information Management System), currently installed in Seoul, Korea. ECS was represented by One Soon Her, Dan Higinbotham and Joseph Pentheroudakis.

Finally, W. Scott Bennett of Siemens-Nixdorf and the Linguistics Research Center at the University of Texas, was there to answer questions about the METAL system. In addition to German-English and English-German, METAL offers German-Spanish, Spanish-German, and French-Dutch.

It was a wonderful opportunity for all the vendors that participated to get together and renew old friendships. Exhibiting at the ATA is always a challenge for MT developers: ATA attendees have the most exacting standards and represent one of the best sources for design improvements ideas.

Translating and the Computer 13, November 1991.

The latest in this series of conferences took place in London on 28th and 29th November 1992, organized by the Aslib Technical Translation Group and the Institute of Translation and Interpreting. Since 1979 the Aslib conferences have provided a forum for translators to learn about developments in MT and computer facilities in the field of translation: multilingual word-processing, optical character recognition, glossary management and terminology issues. As usual, the conference attracted over 200 participants, mainly from Europe, and contained the familiar mixture of descriptions of research in progress and practical experiences of users. In some previous years the strictly MT content has been slight, but this year a whole day was devoted to MT topics.

The first morning began with an account by Simon Andriessen (INK International) of progress in the 'Language Industries Survey' launched by the Commission of the European Communities in 1987. This comprises essentially a large database of information about private and public enterprises involved in language engineering applications and details of over 1,000 commercially available products. The results are to be published next year as the 'Language Engineering Directory'. The morning continued with two papers on MT: John Hutchins attempted to outline, for those unfamiliar with the field, the basic linguistic complexities and the approaches adopted to overcome them; and Douglas Clarke (Cranfield Institute of Technology) described the advantages of a modular approach to the design of MT systems. The following papers on the first day were devoted to the standards for facilitating the exchange of terminological data (Alan Melby of Brigham Young University), an account of the Eurotermbank at Maastricht (Paul Nekeman), a joint presentation by John Clews (consultant and publisher) and John Parry (Europeanization Computer Products) on the problems of non-English character sets, and two papers by Michael Gavin (Softrans International) and Graham Bason (Lotus Development, Ireland) on the problems associated with the 'localization' of computer software packages, the conversion of commands and menus into other languages and the production of manuals for different environments.

The second day opened with two papers on the evaluation of MT systems. Jacques Durand (Salford University) outlined the basic components (accuracy, robustness, coverage and extensibility) and discussed the development and refinement of criteria for assessing MT systems. Lee Humphreys presented his experience of an evaluation project conducted at Essex University and argued that MT users or potential purchasers should not expect to have to evaluate systems; they should expect systems to perform according to clear specification. The remainder of the second morning was devoted to presentations of MT systems. Nigel Burnford described the facilities available in the Globalink Translation System. François Secheresse described operational experience with Systran, installation and optimization of the system, the role and value of pre-editing, etc. and concluded with an account of recent computational developments (conversion of Systran onto Unix and Sun workstations, rewriting in the C programming language). Thomas Seal described the motives behind ALPNET's change of policy, from producer of machine aids to provider of translation services based on computer technology. It is now acknowledged that most translators do not like the ALPNET/TSS interactive translation facility (Transactive); but they do like to use Autoterm. ALPNET has concluded that systems like TSS are most suitable for large organizations and not individual translators and that the introduction of machine aids requires careful planning and support if the potential benefits are to be achieved.

The final afternoon was devoted to reports on MT research. Makoto Nagao (Kyoto University) gave an excellent survey of current developments in Japan, covering statistics on companies producing systems, the number of systems in daily use, the level of government support for research, the public availability of on-line MT services, and ending with an overview of current research projects. Doug Arnold (Essex University) described the most recent developments in the Eurotra project: the 'pre-industrial' phase ended in 1990, the project is now in a two-year 'transitional programme' with the aim of exploring commercial and research applications. The future is seen in the broader context of the 'linguistic engineering' research programme of the Commission of the European Communities, the development of common tools and resources for multilingual applications and processes, where translation systems represent only one component. The conference ended with a description by Harold Somers (UMIST) of research on the development of tools to enable monolingual users to compose texts interactively in their own language which will then be automatically translated into another language, with translation quality assured by limiting the domain, controlling input vocabulary and using techniques of example-based MT.

The proceedings of the conference will be published during 1992. The published proceedings of last year's conference "Translating & the Computer 12" are now available (see notice in 'Recent publications' of this issue.)

[from JAMT Journal issue 2, September 1991, p.16]

The International Symposium on Multilingual Translation '91 took place on 19th-21st August in Beijing, People's Republic of China. The venue was Chunichi Seinen Yuko Kaikan (The Young People of China and Japan Friendship Assembly Hall). About 150 people attended including those invited from Japan, Taiwan, America and France. Over 20 people from Japan attended. There were lots of young researchers from China.

MMT'91 is the follow-on from MMT'90 which took place last year at CICC's MT Research Centre in Tokyo. The aim is to advance the project for developing a MT system for translating the languages of neighbouring Asian countries. This time MMT was run in conjunction with the International Symposium for Chinese Information Processing Applications 1991.

Presentations included an introduction to CICC's MT project, progress reports on the current status of the part for which China is responsible, and research on natural language processing in China. The invited speakers from Japan, Taiwan, America and France gave presentations on the current status or problem areas of multilingual machine translation and natural language processing. There were two panel discussions:

methods of advancing MT R&D from a technical point of view

progress in MT R&D through control and management Chinese-English simultaneous interpreters were used, so many Chinese speakers spoke in Chinese and the other speakers used English.

The symposium included exhibitions and demonstrations of MT systems, like CICC's MT systems and the related Chinese system.

It is said that at least one MT research project is going on in all the large towns of China. MT research has a long history there and a great deal of interest is shown. Many researchers have studied abroad, they have new computer models like those in Japan and elsewhere and it was clear that research was progressing steadily. The Chinese researchers showed great interest in those from Japan. The symposium provided the opportunity for cordial exchange between the researchers.