A Lost Croatian Cybernetic Machine Translation Program

We are exploring the historical significance of research in the field of machine translation conducted by Bulcsu Laszlo, Croatian linguist, who was a pioneer in machine translation in Yugoslavia during the 1950s. We are focused on two important seminal papers written by members of his research group between 1959 and 1962, as well as their legacy in establishing a Croatian machine translation program based around the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences of the University of Zagreb in the late 1950s and early 1960s. We are exploring their work in connection with the beginnings of machine translation in the USA and USSR, motivated by the Cold War and the intelligence needs of the period. We also present the approach to machine translation advocated by the Croatian group in Yugoslavia, which is different from the usual logical approaches of the period, and his advocacy of cybernetic methods, which would be adopted as a canon by the mainstream AI community only decades later.

[1]  Hilary Putnam,et al.  Mathematics, Matter and Method: Philosophical Papers , 1979 .

[2]  W. Pitts,et al.  A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity (1943) , 2021, Ideas That Created the Future.

[3]  Yoshua Bengio,et al.  Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate , 2014, ICLR.

[4]  W. J. Hutchins,et al.  Yehoshua Bar-Hillel: a philosopher’s contribution to machine translation , 2000 .

[5]  Hermann Ney,et al.  HMM-Based Word Alignment in Statistical Translation , 1996, COLING.

[6]  X. Ren,et al.  Mathematics , 1935, Nature.

[7]  W. John Hutchins.  Yehoshua Bar-Hillel , 2000 .

[8]  Peter Norvig,et al.  Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach , 1995 .

[9]  E. F. Moore,et al.  Variable-length binary encodings , 1959 .

[10]  Ian Horrocks,et al.  Description Logics , 2008, Handbook of Knowledge Representation.

[11]  Alex Graves,et al.  Recurrent Models of Visual Attention , 2014, NIPS.

[12]  David D. Lewis,et al.  An evaluation of phrasal and clustered representations on a text categorization task , 1992, SIGIR '92.

[13]  Hermann Ney,et al.  Improved Alignment Models for Statistical Machine Translation , 1999, EMNLP.

[14]  Sang Joon Kim,et al.  A Mathematical Theory of Communication , 2006 .

[15]  Norbert Wiener,et al.  Cybernetics: Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. , 1949 .

[16]  Yehoshua Bar-Hillel,et al.  The present state of research on mechanical translation , 1951, EARLYMT.

[17]  J. Lambek.  The Mathematics of Sentence Structure , 1958 .

[18]  Hermann Ney,et al.  Alignment-Based Neural Machine Translation , 2016, WMT.

[19]  Yehoshua Bar-Hillel.  Some Linguistic Problems Connected with Machine Translation , 1953, Philosophy of Science.

[20]  Peter Norvig,et al.  Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming: Case Studies in Common Lisp , 1991 .

[21]  Stuart J. Russell,et al.  Artificial Intelligence , 1999 .

[22]  Gerhardt von Bonin,et al.  Cybernetics or control and communication in the animal and the machine: Norbert wiener, 1948. 194 pp. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Paris: Hermann et cie , 1949 .