Abstract. In the last ten years there has been a significant amount of research in Machine Translation within a “new ” paradigm of empirical approaches, often labelled collectively as “Example-based” approaches. The first manifestation of this approach caused some surprise and hostility among observers more used to different ways of working, but the techniques were quickly adopted and adapted by many researchers, often creating hybrid systems. This paper reviews the various research efforts within this paradigm reported to date, and attempts a categorisation of different manifestations of the general approach.

A new framework for a system that aids online volunteer translators is proposed. As regards this proposal, first, the current status and conditions of online volunteer translators and their translation environments are examined, and general requirements for a system that would aid these translators are given. Our proposed approach for dealing with heterogeneous data, which involves providing a new XML structure that we have developed for maximizing efficiency and functionalities, is then described. 1.

The history of machine translation is described from its beginnings in the 1940s to the present day. In the earliest years, efforts were concentrated either on developing immediately useful systems, however crude in their translation quality, or on fundamental research for high quality translation systems. After the ALPAC report in 1966, which virtually ended MT research in the US for more than a decade, research focussed on the development of systems requiring human assistance for producing translations of technical documentation, on translation tools for direct use by translators themselves, and, in recent years, on systems for translating email, Web pages and other Internet documentation, where poor quality is acceptable in the interest of rapid results.

This paper traces the history of efforts to develop computer programs (software) for the translation of natural languages, commonly and traditionally called ‘machine translation ’ (MT), or, in non-English-speaking countries, ‘automatic translation ’ (traduction automatique, avtomaticheskij perevod). A brief history can of course mention only the most significant research systems and projects

The main research issues in building web services for mutualized, non-commercial translation à la Montaigne are (1) the design and robust implementation of a web-oriented “translation editor ” offering various types of help (dictionary access, translation memory, and MT); (2) how to search the web for already translated subsegments; and (3) how to allow contributors to work “off line”, and automatically synchronize later. We are trying to study these problems by prototyping solutions in 2 steps, building first QRLex, a community-oriented web site for helping volunteer translators, and then a wiki-like “full ” Montaigne web site.

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this article, we will give an overview of the EBMT technology. In the next section we will review the history of EBMT, with a focus on the main ideas. Since a comprehensive review of EBMT can be found in Somers (2000a), we will focus on the discussion of our viewpoints of the EBMT framework. Then we will define the notion of example and examine the major issues involved in EBMT, covering mainly the four major stages of EBMT, namely, example acquisition, example base management, example application and target sentence generation. Some of our current work in lexical-based text alignment for example acquisition is also discussed, highlighting the formulation of a similarity measure and alignment algorithm, before concluding our discussion in the last section

This paper proposes a new framework for a system which will help online volunteers to perform translations on their PCs while sharing resources and tools and communicating via websites. The current status of such online volunteer translators and their translation practices and tools are examined, along with related work also being discussed. General requirements are derived from these considerations. The approach taken in this study for dealing with heterogeneous linguistic resources relies on an XML structure maximizing efficiency and enabling all of the desired functionalities. The QRLex environment is under development and implements this new framework.

In this paper we report on our recent work in clause alignment for English-Chinese legal texts using available lexical resources including a bilingual legal glossary and a bilingual dictionary, for the purpose of acquiring examples at various linguistic levels for example-based machine translation. We present our formulation of an appropriate measure for the similarity of a candidate pair of clauses with respect to matched lexical items and the corresponding implementation of an e#ective algorithm for clause alignment based on this similarity measure. Experimental results show that the similarity measure and the lexical-based clause alignment algorithm, though very simple, are very e#ective, with a performance of 94.6% alignment accuracy. It confirms our intuition that lexical information gives a reliable indication of correct alignment. The significance of this lexical-based approach lies in both its simplicity and e#ectiveness.

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