Machine translation: past, present, future
Machine translation: past, present, future
Transition network grammars for natural language analysis
Communications of the ACM
Functional Unification Grammar: a formalism for machine translation
ACL '84 Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Computational Linguistics and 22nd annual meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics
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Within a few years of the first appearance of the "electronic calculators," research had begun on using computers as aids for translating natural languages. The major stimulus was a memorandum in July 1949 by Warren Weaver, who after mentioning tentative efforts in the UK (by Booth and Richens) and in the USA (by Huskey and others), put forward possible lines of research. His optimism stemmed from the wartime success in code-breaking, from developments by Shannon in information theory (q.v.), and from speculations about universal principles underlying natural languages, "the common base of human communication." Within a few years research had begun at many US universities, and in 1954 there was the first public demonstration of the feasibility of machine translation (MT), a collaboration of IBM and George-town University. Although using a very restricted vocabulary and grammar it was sufficiently impressive to stimulate massive funding of MT in the USA and to inspire the establishment of MT projects throughout the world.