LINGUIST List 14.2063

Fri Aug 1 2003

Media: NYT Article on Machine Translation

Editor for this issue: Karen Milligan <karenlinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Karen Chung, Media: NYT: Language-learning computers

Editor's note: Thanks to Elizabeth Pyatt, who also sent notice of
this article.


 There's a piece in the July 31, 2003 online edition of the New York
 Times entitled:

 From Uzbek to Klingon, the Machine Cracks the Code
 by Christopher John Farah

 A sample paragraph:

 Traditional machine translation relies on painstaking efforts by
bilingual programmers to enter the vast wealth of information on
vocabulary and syntax that the computer needs to translate one
language into another. But in the early 1990's, a team of researchers
at I.B.M. devised another way to do things: feeding a computer an
English text and its translation in a different language. The computer
then uses statistical analysis to "learn" the second language.

 The URL:

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/31/technology/circuits/31next.html?8cir

 Karen Steffen Chung

 http://ccms.ntu.edu.tw/~karchung/
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