LINGUIST List 2.630

Wed 09 Oct 1991

Disc: Machine Readable Dictionaries and Spanish MT

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Directory

1. Circle Noetic Svc, A Nizhnikov,PAS, Re: 2.587 Machine Readable Dictionaries
2. , RE: 2.613 Queries
3. Derk Ederveen, Re: 2.613 - Machine translation involving spanish

Message 1: Re: 2.587 Machine Readable Dictionaries

To Pam Munroe on machine readable dictionaries...
I don't know much about what's around in academia. There are lots of
dictionaries in the corporate world without pronunciations. Generally these
cost from $5000 - $10,000. You can also find packaged programs with
pronunciations for sale, but the ASCII files are harder to find and much more
expensive. We sell ASCII files in that price range, but no pronunciations. We
can't afford to make them unless we sell them for a lot, unfortunately.
However there is one list I know of for English with pronunciations called
MobyPronounced by someone called Grady Ward - it's perhaps very well known
amoung academic linguists. I don't know. It has about 167,000 words. He also
sells hyphenated lists, frequency lists, specialized lists and others. The
sizes vary from around 100,000 words to 500,000, I think. And they are very
inexpensive - close to the cost of duplicating and mailing the disks.
The address:
Grady Ward
380 N. Bayview Ave.
Sunnyvale, CA 94086
I'm also very interested in what is available.
Margaret Nizhnikov

Message 2: RE: 2.613 Queries

>Date: Fri, 4 Oct 91 01:10:45 -0400
>From: "l. valentine" <valentinjulian.uwo.ca>
>Subject: Machine Translation Involving Spanish
>
>Is anyone aware of any machine translation projects
>either ongoing or completed involving Spanish?
>Can anyone point me to some current literature
>on the subject of machine translation in general,
>or more specifically, projects involving
>French or Spanish?
>
>Thanks.
>
One project I know of is the Rosetta Translation System, a machine translation
system sponsored by Philips and located at the company's Physics Laboratory
in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. It has gone beyond the initial development
stages now, so it is an actually working system with user interfaces and the
lot, though it is not yet commercially or otherwise available, as far as I know.
The program translates between Dutch, English and Spanish (Spanish only as
a target language starting out from Dutch; I think they're still working on
an English-Spanish interface). The grammar is predominantly Montague, with
aspects of Transformational Grammar incorporated. The set-up functions best at
the moment as a semi-automatic program, with the user choosing the most
suitable meaning of a homographic word from a set offered on pull-down menus to
reduce ambiguity.
As this is all I know about the system (and only second-hand), you can
contact the Rosetta research team at:
Philips Research Laboratories
P.O. Box 80 000
5600 JA Eindhoven
The Netherlands
Richard Piepenbrock
richardhnympi52 (bitnet)
richardcelex.kun.nl (internet)

Message 3: Re: 2.613 - Machine translation involving spanish

> Date: Fri, 4 Oct 91 01:10:45 -0400
> From: "l. valentine" <valentinjulian.uwo.ca>
> Subject: Machine Translation Involving Spanish
>
> Is anyone aware of any machine translation projects
> either ongoing or completed involving Spanish?
> Can anyone point me to some current literature
> on the subject of machine translation in general,
> or more specifically, projects involving
> French or Spanish?
I came across one article:
David B. Roe, Fernando Pereira, Richard W. Sproat, Michael D. Riley,
Pedro J. Moreno, Alejandro Macarr\'on:
"Toward a spoken language translator for restricted-domain context-free
languages",
Proceedings Eurospeech'91, sept 24-26, Genova, Italy, vol.3, pp. 1063-1066
This is a project aiming at realtime spoken language translation between
spanish and american english for a limited domain, conducted by AT&T Bell
Labs, USA and Telef\'onica Investigaci\'on y Desarrollo, Spain.
Derk Ederveen <D.Ederveenpttrnl.nl> +31-70-3323202 PTT Research/Nijmegen Univ.