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<Paper uid="C82-2066">
  <Title>BEDE= A MICROPROCESSOR-BASED MACHINE TRANSLATION SYSTEM</Title>
  <Section position="1" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="abstr">
    <SectionTitle>
BEDE= A MICROPROCESSOR-BASED MACHINE TRANSLATION SYSTEM
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> H.L, Somers and R.L. Johnson Centre for Computational Linguistics, ~niversity of Mancheste~ Institute of Science and Technology The proposed paper describes an on-goin6 research pro~eot being carried out by staff and students at the Centre for Computational Linguistics to design a. limited-syntax controlled-vocabulary machine translation system of sophisticated design to run on .a microprocessor.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> 1 t. Background Bede is essentially a research project: we are not immediately concerned with commercial applications, thouek such are clearly p~ssible if the research proves fruitful. Work on Bede at this stage thoueh is primarily experimental. The aim at the moment is to investigate the extent to which a microprocessor-based ~.T. system of advanced design is possible, and the limitations that have to be imposed in order to. achieve a workin 8 system. This paper describes the overall system design specification to which ~ are currently workine. In the basic design of the system we attempt to incorporate as much as possible features of large-scale ~.Tdeg systems that have proved to be desirable or effective. Thus, Beds is multllingual by design (i.e. not based on language pairs) (of. King, 1981:12)! algorithms and linguistic data are strictly separated (of. Johnson, 1979:140); and the system is designed in more or less independent modules (ofdeg Vauquols,</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> The microprocessor environment means that oz~Lteria of size are important: data structure both dynamic (created by and maz~pulated during the translation process) and static (dictionaries and linguistic rule packages) are constrained to be as economical in terms of storage space and access procedures as possible,Limitations on in-core and peripheral storage are important considerations in the system design.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> In large ~eneral purpose M.T. systems, it is necessary to assume that failure to translate given input correctly is generally not due to incozTectly formed input, but to insufficiently elaborated translation algorithms. This is particularly due to two problems: the lexical problem of choice of ~ppropriate translation equivalents, and the strate~c problem of effective analysis of the wide r~e of syntactic patterns found in natural langu~e. The reduction of these problems via the notions of controlled vocabulary and restricted e~rntax seem particularly appropz~ate in the microprocessor environment, since the alternative of making a system infinitely extendable is probably not feasible. Both notions have been tried w~th bigger systems, resulting both in better results from the M.T. system itself, and in increased leF~Lbility from a human point of view of source texts (cf. Ducro%, 1972! Ellieton, 1978! Lawson, 1979&amp;quot;81-21 So~ners and McNaught, 1980:49). Given these constraints, it seems feasible to achieve translation via an &amp;quot;interlingus&amp;quot; (cf. Veillon, 1969! Hutchiz~s, 1978z 131), in which the canonical structures from the source lan&amp;n~a~e =are mapped directly onto those of the target lan4gaage(s), avoiding any langua~e-pe~ir oriented &amp;quot;transfer&amp;quot; ste4~e. ~=ranslation thus takes place in two phases= analysis of source text and synthesis of target text.</Paragraph>
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