Third International Conference on Theoretical and Methodological Issues in Machine Translation of Natural Languages
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This conference offered a forum for the exchange of information on theoretical and methodological issues related to grammar writing, lexicon acquisition, interlinguality, new approaches to machine translation and the evaluation of MT systems. This report is intended as a commentary on the more salient aspects of the conference and the implications they might have for MT research; it is not intended as an objective, exhaustive review. In opening remarks, Winfred P. Lehmann challenged researchers to treat language as a semiotic system encompassing syntactic, semantic and pragmatic dimensions; this view was promoted as essential to preserving meaning in MT. Four subsequent presentations distinguished themselves by returning to this theme and specifying a stance with regard to its theoretical and methodological issues; these presentations addressed MT in general, as opposed to particular systems. Sergei Nirenburg outlined what has been called the maximalist position, arguing that MT should work towards “complete understanding” of semantic and pragmatic phenomena encoded in source language texts, even though achievement of this goal using fully automated methods may be beyond the reach of the current state of the art. Winfield S. Bennett presented the minimalist response in a paper which promoted a cost-effectiveness view of semantic processing. He maintained that an optimal MT design might incorporate little more than a semantic feature system, an architectural characteristic known to produce a negligible amount of