PS： 1966年的这篇报告直接阻碍了机器翻译20年的研究。但语义障碍和计算语言学两个说法，很有价值。

ALPAC (Automatic Language Processing Advisory Committee) was a committee of seven scientists led by John R. Pierce, established in 1964 by the U. S. Government in order to evaluate the progress incomputational linguistics in general and machine translation in particular. Its report, issued in 1966, gained notoriety for being very skeptical of research done in machine translation so far, and emphasizing the need for basic research in computational linguistics; this eventually caused the U. S. Government to reduce its funding of the topic dramatically.

LANGUAGE AND MACHINES

COMPUTERS IN TRANSLATION AND LINGUISTICS

A Report by the

Automatic Language Processing Advisory Committee

Division of Behavioral Sciences

National Academy of Sciences

National Research Council

Publication 1416

National Academy of Sciences

National Research Council

Washington, D. C. 1966

Victor H. Yngve of the MIT Research Laboratory of Electronics, in answer to a request from Committee Chairman John R. Pierce, expressed his views as follows:

I concur with your view of machine translation, that at present it serves no useful purpose without postediting, and that with postediting the over-all process is slow and probably uneconomical.

As to the possibility of fully automatic translation, I am convinced that we will some day reach the point where this will be feasible and economical.

However, there is considerable basic knowledge required that we simply don't

have at the moment, and it is anybody's guess how soon this knowledge can be

obtained. However, I am dedicated to trying to obtain some of this knowledge.

The question as to whether fully automatic translation will ever be economical

must wait until we see whether it is possible at all. I feel that if it is possible,

then it will be economical in the future because of the rapid advances in

computer technology.

In his paper, “Implications of Mechanical Translation Research” [Proc.

Am. Philosophical Soc. 108, 275 (1964)], Dr. Yngve notes:

Work in mechanical translation has come up against a semantic barrier. . .

We have come face to face with the realization that we will only have adequate

mechanical translation when the machine can “understand” what it is translating

and this will be a very difficult task indeed . . . “understand” is just what I

mean . . . some of us are pressing forward undaunted.

The Committee indeed believes that it is wise to press forward undaunted,

in the name of science, but that the motive for doing so cannot sensibly be any

foreseeable improvement in practical translation. Perhaps our attitude might be

different if there were some pressing need for machine translation, but we find

none.

If we compare the cost of human in-house translation ($40 per 1,000

Russian words) with the cost of machine-aided translation within FTD ($36 per

1,000 Russian words), machine-aided translation appears to be somewhat less

expensive. But FTD machine-aided translation is costlier than contract

translation ($33 per 1,000) and far costlier than Joint Publications Research

Service (JPRS) translation ($16 per 1,000 English words).

Recommendations

The Committee recommends expenditures in two distinct areas.

The first is computational linguistics as a part of linguistics– studies of

parsing, sentence generation, structure, semantics, statistics, and quantitative

linguistic matters, including experiments in translation, with machine aids or

without. Linguistics should be supported as science, and should not be judged

by any immediate or foreseeable contribution to practical translation.

The second area is improvement of translation. Work should be supported

on such matters as

1. practical methods for evaluation of translations;

2. means for speeding up the human translation process;

3. evaluation of quality and cost of various sources of translations;

4. investigation of the utilization of translations, to guard against

production of translations that are never read;

5. study of delays in the over-all translation process, and means for

eliminating them, both in journals and in individual items;

6. evaluation of the relative speed and cost of various sorts of machineaided

translation;

7. adaptation of existing mechanized editing and production processes in

translation;

8. the over-all translation process; and

9. production of adequate reference works for the translator, including the

adaptation of glossaries that now exist primarily for automatic

dictionary look-up in machine translation.

All such studies should be aimed at increasing the speed and decreasing

the cost of translations and at specifying degrees of acceptable quality.