FORUM ON MACHINE TRANSLATION 
What Should Machine Translation Be? 
John S. White 
Siemens Information Systems 
Linguistics Research Center 
PO Box 7247 University Station 
Austin, TX 78712 
MODERATOR STATEMENT 
After a considerable hiatus of interest and funding, 
machine translation has come in recent years to occupy a sig- 
nificant place in the discipline of natural language processing. 
It has also become one of the most visible representations of 
natural language processing to the outside world. Machine 
translation systems are relatively unique with respect to the 
extent of the coverage they attempt, and, correspondingly, 
the size of the grammatical and lexicaI corpora involved. Ad- 
ding to this the complexity introduced by multiple language 
directions into the same system design (and the enormous 
procedural problems imposed by simultaneous development 
in several sites) gives some clue as to the optimism which 
presently exists for machine translation. 
It is obviously believed in many quarters that computer 
science and linguistic science have become sufficient for 
production-environment machine translation. Private sector 
companies continue to introduce new MT systems to the 
marketplace worldwide, and many more are venturing into 
development and implementation. The industrial interest, 
meanwhile, has been instrumental in opening up possibilities 
for doing basic research in it, in part because of direct inter- 
action between industry and research, and in part because of 
the overall increased awareness. It is indeed worth speculat- 
ing whether renewed interest shown by governmental scien- 
tific agencies is related to the level of commercial acceptance. 
But some feel that this visibility causes more harm than 
good. The concern has been expressed that an operational 
failure in machine translation will be seen as a failure in 
natural language processing generally, that a particular im- 
plementation rejected by users could cause a snowball ul- 
timately resulting in the demise not just of MT as in the AL- 
PAC aftermath, but also of all of computational linguistics. 
Some may go so far as to suggest that such a day of 
reckoning will be inevitable as long as production-level 
machine translation efforts continue. 
If it is indeed the case that production machine trans- 
lation is not feasible, then machine translation is at best a 
heuristic environment for experimentation in linguistic 
theory. And machine translation does serve such an end ad- 
mirably well: the modularity of program and linguistic 
description of which a well-designed translation system is 
capable allows work on hypotheses within one linguistic 
theory, or evaluation of different linguistic theories, without 
fundamental changes to the computing environment. 
Two positions are identified here, whose distance from 
each other serves perhaps to encompass the whole range of 
thought on the ultimate potential of machine translation, as 
well as on the best possible design of a translating device. 
The one position holds that MT is a viable production tool 
whose benefit is more than worth the immense effort in- 
volved in linguistic description, textual coverage, and coor- 
dination of multi-national development. The other position 
holds that MT is a useful laboratory for linguistic study in a 
small, easily maintainable computing environment. 
Despite the polarity, there is a common ground, which we 
employ as the datum point from which to explore the issues 
in machine translation today. We have progressed from the 
debate about the possibility of machine translation to the 
debate about what machine translation should be. This in 
itself is indicative of our awareness of the progress of com- 
putational linguistics as a whole. 
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