Machine Translation with Minimum Human Learning (MT/MHL)

[Yao Ziyuan]

Machine Translation with Minimum Human Learning (MT/MHL) - Before
artificial intelligence reaches its fullest potential, machine
translation always faces unresolvable ambiguities. The good news is,
statistical MT such as Google Translate disambiguates content words
quite well, and syntactic ambiguity can largely be "transferred" to
the target language, without being resolved, if both the source and
the target language have common syntactic features (e.g. both English
and French support prepositional phrases so "I passed the test with
his help." can be translated to French without determining whether
"with his help" modifies "passed" or "the test"). The bad news is,
syntactic disambiguation usually can't be bypassed between a language
pair like English to Chinese, as in Chinese you must put "with his
help" before the constituent it modifies ("passed" or "the test").
Resolution of syntactic ambiguity requires capabilities ranging from
shallow rules (e.g. "with help" should modify an action rather than an
entity, and if there are more than one actions -- both "pass" and
"test" can be considered actions -- it should modify the verb --
"pass") to the most sophisticated reasoning based on context or even
information external to the text (e.g. in "Do you see the cat near the
tree and the man?", what is the prepositional object of "near"? "The
tree" or "the tree and the man"?)

In light of automatic code-switching, an emerging technology that
promises to make foreign language learning efficient and effortless,
we can actually prepare a human with essential syntactic knowledge
(including key prepositions) of a foreign language (or language
family), so that machine translation can simply take care of content
word translation and leave syntactic puzzles "as is" to the human. For
example, when translating "I passed the test with his help." to
Chinese, instead of trying to determine which word is modified by
"with his help", the MT system simply retain the original word order
and preposition ("with"), and just translate the content words: 我 通过了 测
试 with 他的 帮助 (which literally means "I PASSED THE-TEST with HIS
HELP").