Let us speculate about what could be an autonomous MT system. In the present state of MT we provide rules and dictionary to the software (rules-based translation) or we feed it with a corpus regarding a given pair of languages (statistical MT). But let us imagine that we could do otherwises and build an autonomous […]
The classical divide with regard to MT separates statistical from rule-based MT. But this divide is not as clear-cut as one could think at first glance. For rule-based MT can operate statistically. Let us take an example, concerning the disambiguation of French ‘est’: it can be translated either as is or as east, depending on […]
Let us discuss the question of priority pairs with regard to endangered languages. It consists of the most wanted translation pairs for a given endangered language, in keeping with the main language with which it is associated. To take an example: French-Corsican is the priority pair for Corsican language. In the same way, Italian-Gallurese is […]
Let us give some further examples of two-sided grammatical analysis: “à dessein” (purposedly), “à volonté” (at will), “à tort” (mistakenly): from an analytical standpoint, these are prepositions followed by a singular noun. From a synthetical viewpoint, they are adverbs (adverbial locutions). “à jamais” (forever): from an analytical standpoint, it is a preposition followed by an […]
Let us call two-sided grammatical analysis the type of grammatical analysis that will be described below. Two-sided grammatical analysis contrasts with one-sided analysis, which sees a sequence of words either as a locution type (adverbial locution, verbal locution, noun locution, etc.) or as the sequence of types of it constituent words. From the standpoint of […]
Let us investigate an issue that relates to disambiguation. It is a hard case that needs to be addressed: I shall call it in what follows, for reasons that will become clearer later, polymorphic disambiguation. Let us take an example. It relates to the translation of the two consecutive words: ‘de fait’. The first French […]