The PANGLOSS MARK I MAT system 
Robert Frederking, Ariel Cohen, Dean Grannes, Peter Cousseau and Sergei Nirenburg 
Center for Machine Translation 
Carnegie Mellon University 
Pittsburgh, PA 15213 USA 
The goal of the PANGLOSS projecd is to develop a sys- 
tem which will, from the very beginning, produce high- 
quality translations of unconstrained text. This can only 
be attained currently by keeping the human in the trans- 
lation loop, in our case via a software module called the 
AUO~R. The main measure of progress in the de- 
velopment of the Pangloss system will therefore be the 
gradual decrease in need for user assistance, as the level 
of automation increases. 
The analyzer used in the first version of PANGLOSS, PAN- 
GLOSS MARK I, is a version of the ULTRA Spanish analyzer 
from NMSU \[Farwell 1990\], while generation is carried 
out by the PENMAN generator from ISI \[Mann 1983\]. The 
Translator's Workstation (TWS) provides the user inter- 
face and the integration platform \[Nirenburg 1992\]. This 
paper focuses on this use of TWS as a substrate for PAN- 
GLOSS. 
PANOLOSS operates in the following mode: a) a fully- 
automated translation of each full sentence is attempted; 
if it fails, then b) a fully-automated translation of smaller 
chunks of text is attempted (in the first PANGLOSS con- 
figuration, PANGLOSS MARK I, these were noun phrases); 
c) the material that does not get covered by noun phrases 
is treated in "word-for-word" mode, whereby translation 
suggestions for each word (or phrase) are sought in the 
system's MT lexicons, a machine-readable dictionary, and 
a set of user glossaries; d) The resulting list of trans- 
lated noun phrases and translation suggestions for words 
and phrases is displayed in a special editor window of 
TWS, where the human user finalizes the translation. At 
stages a) and b) there is an option of the user being pre- 
sented by the system with disambiguation questions via 
the AUGMENTOR. We provide an intelligent environment, 
the CMAT (Constituent Machine-Aided Translation) edi- 
tor, for postediting. It allows the user to select, move, 
and delete words and phrases (constituents) quickly and 
easily, using dynamically-changing menus. 
As can be seen in Figure 1, each constituent in the target 
window is surrounded by "<<" and ">>" characters. If the 
user clicks with the mouse anywhere within a constituent 
(between the "<<" and ">>" symbols), a CMAT menu for 
that constituent appears. It contains the word or phrase 
in the source text if available, the functions Move and 
Delete, and alternative translations of the word or phrase 
from the source text if any. Using these popup menus, the 
user moves, replaces, or deletes a constituent with a single 
mouse action, rapidly turning the list of translated words 
1PANOLOSS is a joint project of the Center for Machine 
Translation at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), the Corn- 
puling Research Laboratory of New Mexico State University 
(NMSU), and the Information Sciences Institute of the Univer- 
sity of Southern California (IS1). 
III IIIII I ........................ . ._..J I IIII I II III "-I ~,.~,~ol )-. 
IJ ,<Realty Refund Trust,~ <~bug, ,<tlae I 
properties)> ~of>> <<two>~ <<company>> 
I <~Realty Refund Trust>) <<in)) <<one e~fort~> 
J<<by>> <<to axtencb> <dts:l~ <<Investment 
II>ortfolio>) <<and>) ¢<increas~) <<its)> 
J<<returm) <<to decide)) <~buy:l>) <<two)) i<<comt:,; 
........... state> <<of)) <<limited J liab~| s~kedk¢~# 
New ~ork>) <<in>) <<one 
Jdeali~ at>) <<dollar)) <<two 
80Cie~ tlode: ZJ~; No'llP£ed: XO 
• con~ 
coapmaionship 
eocledad 
sociedades 
Figure 1: A typical CMAT menu 
and phrases into a coherent, high:quality target language 
text. The user is not forced to use the CMAT editor at any 
particular time. Its use can be intermingled with other 
translation activities, according to the user's preferences. 
While the above environment is useful as a substrata 
for a gradual shift to ever more automatic systems, it is 
also useful as a practical translator's tool. Many minor 
improvements of the tool itself are planned that should 
together result in a significant increase in the human trans- 
lator's comfort and efficiency. 
References 
Farwell, D., Y. Wilks, 1990. ULTRA: a Multi-lingual 
Machine Translator. Memoranda in Computing and Cog- 
nitive Science MCCS-90-202, Computing Research Lab- 
oratory, New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, NM, 
USA. 
Mann, W., 1983. An Overview of the Penman Text Gen- 
eration System. In Proceedings of the Third AAAI Con- 
ference (261-265). Also available as USC/Information 
Sciences Institute Research Report RR-83-114. 
Nirenburg, S., E Shell, A. Cohen, E Cousseau, D. 
Grannes, C. McNeilly, 1992. Multi-purpose Devel- 
opment and Operation Environments for Natural Lan- 
guage Applications, In Proceedings of the 3rd Confer- 
ence on Applied Natural Language Processing (ANLP- 
92), Trento, Italy. 
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