Developing a system that accurately produces a good translation between human languages is the goal of Machine Translation (MT) systems.
ISA or not ISA: The Interlingual Dilemma for Machine Translation
Download Resources
PDF Accessibility
One or more of the PDF files on this page fall under E202.2 Legacy Exceptions and may not be completely accessible. You may request an accessible version of a PDF using the form on the Contact Us page.
Developing a system that accurately produces a good translation between human languages is the goal of Machine Translation (MT) systems. This problem requires a sophisticated lexicon which associates words with "meanings". This paper looks at MT as a bizarre problem (Kercel, 1999). First we describe MT and typical solutions while identifying the notion of an interlingual, or language-independent, representation. We present challenges and issues in developing this representation, particularly the notion of language-independence. Finally, we recommend a potentially more effective approach to developing lexical components based on the bizarre system model.