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Computer-based method and system for monolingual document

1. Are the cylinders located on the inside or are you supposed to check the inside of the cylinders There are two kinds of possible ambiguities Lexical ambiguities Lexical ambiguities occur where a word can have one or more meanings in the constrained language While it is a desirable that in the constrained language each word should have only one meaning per part of speech there are some words which will have more than one meaning For example the word gas can have the meaning natural gas or gasoline At the lexical level too the problem may be caused by one word which can be used in two different syntactic roles in CSL Such is the case of fuel which be either a noun or a verb in CSL When the author inputs a sentence where the syntactic role is not clear the Grammar Checker GC 620 may prompt the author as follows Author s Input When Checked The sensor is attached to fuel rack GC Message The term may be used as a noun or as a verb At this point the author has the option of editing the sentence without help from the system which simply requires rewriting and submitting again to the checker If the author opts to request for help the system may offer specific instructions to deal with problems of the same type In this case the help is specific Help GC Message If the word is a noun you may want to use a determiner before it If it is a verb can a determiner after it help Example The
2. PNE mer the source text and providing interactive feedback to 63 Continuation of application No 08 363 309 Dec 22 1994 remove syntactic grammatical errors and semantic ambigu ities in the source text 51 Int CL GO6F 17 28 52 U S CL i a ee itte 704 9 26 Claims 10 Drawing Sheets 1E 410 AS VIEWED IN THE AUTHORING TOOL 410 IE 450 AS FILED 450 LIBRARY UNIQUE HEADING p UNIQUE OBJECT UNIQUE HEADING UNIQUE OBJECT GRAPHICS NAME 1 CATABLES NAME2 RELEASE LIBRARY 1 15 9 E2 10 7 E4 1 8 1 12 5 995 920 Page 2 OTHER PUBLICATIONS The KBMT Project A Case Study in Knowledge Based Machine Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc 1991 Lexicographic Principles amp Design for Knowledge Based Machine Paper No CMU CMT 90 118 Carnegie Mel lon Center An Efficient Interlingua Translation System for Multi Document Production Wash D C Jul 2 4 1991 Nirenburg Acquisition of Very Large Knowledge Bases Methodology Tools and Applications Carnegie Mellon Paper No CMU CMT 88 108 Jun 1988 Machine Translation A Knowledge Based Approach Morgan Publishers Inc 1992 An Introduction to Machine Translation Academic Press The Hierarchical Organization of Predicate Frames Mapping in Natural Language Proc ZCMU CMT 90 117 Tomita et al The Universal Parser Architecture for K
3. SYNONYMS AND CHOOSE 758 700 Fig 7 U S Patent Nov 30 1999 Sheet 9 of 10 5 995 920 FROM 620 SYNTACTICALLY CORRECT TEXT SEMANTIC ANALYSIS 815 805 810 SEMANTICALLY CORRECT AUTHOR CORRECTS INTERLINGUA 820 825 FIG 5 995 920 Sheet 10 of 10 Nov 30 1999 U S Patent 096 39vn9Nv I 29931 1X31 5 995 920 1 COMPUTER BASED METHOD AND SYSTEM FOR MONOLINGUAL DOCUMENT DEVELOPMENT This is a continuation application of application Ser No 08 363 309 filed Dec 22 1994 now U S Pat No 5 677 835 BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTON 1 Field of the Invention The present invention relates generally to computer based document creation and translation system and more particularly to a system for authoring and translating constrained language text to a foreign language with no pre or post editing required 2 Related Art Every organization whose activities require the generation of vast quantities of information in a variety of documents is confronted with the need to ensure their full intelligibility Ideally such documents should be authored in simple direct language featuring all necessary expressive attributes to optimize communication This language should be consis tent so that the organization is identified through its single stable voice This language should be unambiguous The pursuit of this kind of writi
4. requiring no post editing For a system that features translation as a central component the integration of the authoring and the trans lation functions of the present invention within a unified framework is the only way devised to date that eliminates both pre and postediting The text TE 140 is a set of tools to support the authors and editors in creating documents in CSL These tools will help authors to use the appropriate CSL vocabulary and grammar to write their documents The TE 140 communi cates with the author 160 and vice versa directly Referring to FIG 1 b the IATS 105 is divided into four main parts to perform the authoring and translation func tions 1 a Constrained Source Language CSL 133 2 a Text Editor LE 140 3 a MT 120 and 4 a Domain Model DM 137 The Text Editor 140 includes a Language Editor 130 and a Graphics Editor 150 In addition a File 5 995 920 5 Management System FMS 110 is also provided for con trolling all processes The CSL 133 is a subset of a source language whose grammar and vocabulary cover the domain of the author s documentation which is to be translated The CSL 133 is defined by specifications of the vocabulary and grammatical constructions allowed so that the translation process is made possible without the aid of pre and post editing The TE 140 is a set of tools to support authors and editors in creating documents in CSL These tools will help authors to use t
5. well known in the art See for example Brachman and Schmolze An Overview of the KL ONE Knowledge Repre sentation System Cognitive Science vol 9 1985 Lenat et al Using Common Sense Knowledge to Overcome Brittleness and Knowledge Acquisition Bottlenecks AI Magazine 65 85 1985 Hobbs Overview of the Tacitus Project Computational Linguistics 12 3 1986 and Niren burg et al Acquisition of Very Large Knowledge Bases Methodology Tools and Applications Center for Machine Translation Carnegie Mellon University 1988 all of which are incorporated herein by reference The ontology is a language independent conceptual rep resentation of a specific subworld such as heavy equipment troubleshooting and repair or the interaction between per sonal computers and their users It provides the semantic information necessary in the sublanguage domain for pars ing source text in interlingua text and generating target texts from interlingua texts The domain model has to be of sufficient detail to provide sufficient semantic restrictions that eliminate ambiguities in parsing and the ontological model must provide uniform definitions of basic ontological categories that are the building blocks for descriptions of particular domains In a world model the ontological concepts can be first subdivided into objects events forces introduced to account for intentionless agents and properties Properties can be further subdivided in
6. wherein said grammar checker provides a means for interactive disambiguation 19 The system of claim 14 wherein said vocabulary checker includes a spell checker 20 The system of claim 14 wherein said vocabulary checker is configured to identify words not included in said constrained source language 21 The system of claim 7 wherein said input text is provided in blocks of information elements 22 The system of claim 21 wherein said tags enable said information elements to be described in terms of their content and logical structure 23 The system of claim 7 further comprising storing means for storing said unambiguous constrained text for later use 24 The system of claim 7 further comprising means for marking with a tag a portion of said input text which has been rendered unambiguous constrained text by said inter active enforcement wherein said tag indicates translatabil ity 25 The system of claim 7 wherein said tag is indicative of content and logical structure 26 The system of claim 7 wherein said tag is indicative of a defined meaning of said portion chosen by said author ke ce
7. K DM with synonyms not in CSL and other information to provide 5 995 920 17 useful feedback to the author as he or she composes each information element FIG 5 conceptually illustrates the Domain Model DM used by the present invention The DM 500 is a represen tation of the declarative knowledge about the CSL vocabu lary used by the MT 120 and the LE 130 The DM 500 is made up of three distinct parts 1 A Kernel Domain Model K DM 510 contains all lexical information that is required by both the MT analyzer 127 and the LE 139 in particular the kernel includes all CSL lexical items words and phrases with associated semantic concepts parts of speech morpho logical information etc 2 AMT Domain Model MT DM 520 which contains information that is required only by the MT analyzer 127 The MT Domain Model is the hierarchy of con cepts used for unambiguous mapping and semantic verification in translation It includes selectional restrictions on concepts and a hierarchical classification of concepts 3 ALE Domain Model LE DM 530 contains informa tion that is required only by the LE 130 this includes non CSL synonyms for CSL lexical items dictionary definitions of CSL lexical items and examples of the CSL lexical items in use The Kernel DM 510 will contain one lexical entry for every CSL lexical item word or phrase A lexical entry consists of a lexical item a word or phrase and minimally its associ
8. Trans chmandt Pittsburgh John F _ lation IEEE Trans on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intel Sweet Pittsburgh Pa Kathryn L lisence No 4 pp 376 392 Baker Pittsburgh Pa Nicholas D put IL c gai Brownlow Pittsburgh Pa Alexander Nyberg 3rd The FRAMEKIT User s Guide M Franz Pittsburgh Pa Susan E Version 2 0 Carnegie Mellon Center for Machine Trans Holm Pittsburgh Pa John Robert lation Paper No CMU CMT Memo Russell Leavitt Pittsburgh Pa Deryle List tinued t W Lonsdale Bridgevill Pa Teruko List continued on next page Mitamura Pittsburgh Pa Eric H Primary Examiner Forester W Isen Nyberg 3rd Pittsburgh Pa Assistant Examiner Patrick N Edouard Agent Firm Steve D Lundquist 73 Assignee Caterpillar Inc Peoria Ill M 57 ABSTRACT Notice LE patent 1s subject to a Terminal di A computer based method and system for monolingual aca document development which includes the steps of entering into a text editor input text in a source language checking 21 Appl No 08 632 213 the input text against vocabulary source language constraints and providing interactive feedback relating to 22 Filed Apr 15 1996 the input text if non constrained source language is present The method and system also includes the steps of checking Related U S Application Data for syntactic grammatical errors and semantic ambiguities in
9. complex electronic documents it also makes it possible to describe the physical organization of a document into files SGML is designed to enable documents of any type simple or complex short or long to be described in a manner that is independent of both the system and applica tion This independence enables document interchange between different systems for different applications without misinterpretation or loss of data SGML is a markup language that is a language for marking up or annotating text by means of or by using coded information that adds to the conventional textual information conveyed by a given piece of the text In most cases it takes the form of sequences of characters at various points throughout an electronic document Each sequence is distinguishable from the text around it by the special char acters that begin and end it The software can verify that the correct markup has been inserted into the text by examining the SGML tags upon request The markup is generalized in that it is not specific to any particular system or task For a more in depth discussion of SGML tags see International Standard ISO 8879 Information processing Text and office systems Standard Generalized Markup Language SGML Ref No ISO 8879 1986 The following capabilities are possible due to the use of the SGML tags 1 dividing documents into fragments or translatable units The text editor 140 software uses both punctua tio
10. from an author input text written in a source language a language editor which is an extension of said text editor which interactively enforces first lexical constraints and then grammatical constraints on a natural language subset used by said author to create said input text wherein said author is interactively aided in enforcing said lexical and grammatical constraints on said input text so as to produce unambiguous constrained text and to produce at least one unambiguous constrained information element from at least a portion of said unambiguous constrained text and responsively save said at least one unambiguous constrained information element for later use and wherein said language editor comprises a grammar checker including means for interactive disambigua tion 6 A computer based system for monolingual document development comprising a text editor adapted to accept interactively from an author input text written in a source language a language editor which is an extension of said text editor which interactively enforces lexical and grammatical constraints on a natural language subset used by said author to create said input text wherein said author is interactively aided in enforcing said lexical and gram matical constraints on said input text so as to produce unambiguous constrained text and to produce at least one unambiguous constrained information element from at least a portion of said unambiguous constraine
11. in Func tional Unification Grammar in D Dowty L Karen and A Zwicky eds Natural Language Parsing Psychological Computational and Theoretical Perspectives Cambridge Mass Cambridge University Press pgs 251 278 1985 and Kaplan R and J Bresnan Lexical Functional Gram mar A Formal System for Grammatical Representation in J Bresnan ed The Mental Representation of Grammatical Relations Cambridge Mass MIT Press pgs 172 281 1982 both of which are incorporated by reference In the rest of this document we refer frequently to the notion that a word or phrase may be in CSL or not in CSL Below we will describe the assumptions about the type of vocabulary restrictions that will be imposed by CSL and to clarify the use of the expression in CSL The same word or phrase in English can have many different meanings for example a general purpose dictio nary may list the following definitions for the word leak 1 verb to permit the escape of something through a breach or flaw 2 verb to disclose information without official authority or sanction and 3 noun a crack or opening that permits something to escape from or enter a container or conduit Each of these different meanings is referred to as a sense of the word or phrase Multiple senses for a single word or phrase can cause problems for an MT system which doesn t have all the knowledge that humans use to under sta
12. invention implements absolute adherence to constraints of vocabulary and grammar rather than just stylistic warnings or simple error detection such as subject verb agreement If the sentence is semantically unambiguous then it is translated into Interlingua as shown in block 820 Once the document passes the grammar checker 620 a SGML tag designating CSL approval can be inserted in the document In a preferred embodiment the Grammar Checker 620 provides pass fail feedback to the author 160 However more specific feedback other than pass fail feedback can be implemented For a more in depth discussion of grammar checking including disambiguation see Tomita M Sentence Dis ambiguation by Asking Computers and Translation 1 39 51 1986 and Carbonell J and M Tomita Knowledge Based Machine Translation the CMU Approach in S Nirenburg ed Machine Translation Theoretical and Methodological Issues Cambridge Cam bridge University Press pgs 68 89 1987 both of which are incorporated by reference F Machine Translation The MT 120 is an interlingua type machine translation system In such systems the constrained source language CSL and the target language never come in direct contact The processing in such systems generally occurs in two stages First representing the meaning of the CSL text in a language independent formal language called interlingua and second expressing this meaning using the lexi
13. is selected as shown in block 714 and the procedure 700 begins again from block 710 In particular the Vocabulary checker 610 identifies every instance of a lexical item that is not known to be CSL For each such word the vocabulary checker 610 will determine which of the following descriptions is appli cable and report supporting information to the user interface as listed below a non CSL word having known CSL synonyms in this case the Vocabulary Checker 610 will identify the synonyms For instance let us assume that the word et is non CSL Author s Input When Checked Open the valve and let more nitrogen go to the accumulator VC Message The term is non CSL but there are related CSL alternatives CSL Alternatives allow allowed enable enabled permit permitted leave left CSL Sentence as Edited Open the valve and allow more nitrogen to go to the accumulator a word which may only appear in CSL as part of a phrase but which is not used in a CSL phrase in the current context in this case the Vocabulary Checker 610 will report acceptable CSL phrases containing the word 5 995 920 21 Author s Input When Checked The first time the valve lash is checked the injector timing should be checked VC Message The term is used in a non CSL context CSL Alternatives advance signal timing advance timing groove timing gear timing mechanism CSL Sentence as Edited The first time the valve lash is checked th
14. lexically constrained text 617 is supplied to a grammar checker 620 The grammar checker 620 produces syntactically correct CSL text 625 The con strained syntactically correct text 625 is then disambiguated as shown in block 630 The result of the disambiguation is translatable unambiguous constrained text 635 The trans latable text 635 can be translated into a foreign language without any pre editing required The accuracy of the result ing translation also makes postediting unnecessary 10 15 20 30 35 40 45 50 55 60 65 20 1 Vocabulary Checker FIG 7 shows a flow chart of the operation of vocabulary checker 610 The vocabulary checker 610 identifies words not known to be CSL The vocabulary checker 610 identifies occurrences of non CSL words in an author s text and helps an author find valid CSL replacements for non CSL words It recognizes word boundaries in a document and identifies every instance of a lexical item that is not known to be CSL As shown in block 706 the first term of a unit is selected to be checked The term is then checked as shown in block 710 against a CSL lexical database 1 dictionary which contains all CSL words If the term is not found in the CSL dictionary the term is then spell checked against a standard dictionary as shown in block 722 If the word has been misspelled the author is provided a means of correcting the spelling mistake i e the vocabulary checke
15. ship sinks vs Ship the sinks The author then proceeds to edit the sentence and submits it to the grammar checker 620 again Structural ambigity Structural ambiguity occurs where words in a sentence may group together in more than 5 995 920 23 way For example Remove the valve with the lever Does the phrase with the lever from a unit with the phrase the valve or does it instead from a unit with the verb remove In other words is this a sentence about a valve that has a lever attached to it or is it about using a lever to remove a valve In the IATS 105 the component designed to answer this question is the domain model 137 which is constructed in such a way as to minimize the occurrence of such ambigu ities As shown in FIG 5 the DMIMT 520 which supports exclusively the machine translation process contains two types of information On the one hand the semantic infor mation A supports the identification of relationships between concepts On the other hand the contextual infor mation B specifies for a particular verb the so called deep cases or arguments that such verb can take In the example under consideration let us consider first how the semantic information A and the contextual information B help the analyzer 127 determine the grammatical structure of Remove the valve with the lever Among many semantic relationships there is a relation ship is a part of which
16. to use the system 9 The system of claim 7 wherein said author operates on a workstation which is part of a computer network 10 The system of claim 7 wherein said system for monolingual document development includes an interpreter which is configured to translate said unambiguous con strained source text into interlingua 11 The system of claim 7 wherein said language editor provides said interaction with said author in a batch mode 12 The system of claim 7 further comprising a graphics editor adapted to create text labels wherein said text labels can be edited by said author with the aid of said language editor and subsequently translated by a machine translation system 13 The system of claim 7 wherein said natural language subset is specified as to lexicon and grammar 14 The system of claim 7 wherein said language editor comprises a vocabulary checker and a grammar checker 10 15 20 25 30 32 15 The system of claim 14 wherein said vocabulary checker checks said input text against a permitted lexicon and suggests alternatives to non lexicon word choices 16 The system of claim 14 wherein said grammar checker checks for compliance with predefined grammatical rules and suggests alternatives to undefined grammatical structures 17 The system of claim 14 wherein said grammar checker provides feedback to the author concerning lexical ambiguities and structural ambiguities 18 The system of claim 14
17. various types of concepts called the domain model Referring to FIG 3 and FIG 9 the Machine Translation MT component 120 of the IATS 105 contains two main sections The first the CSL analyzer 127 performs the first processing stage of representing CSL text in interlingua The second main section the Target Language Generator 123 translates the interlingua representation of the CSL approved texts into a target language e g French Japanese Spanish In performing both tasks the MT com ponent 120 runs as one or more independent server modules accepting translation requests from a human translation controller not shown During target language generation target language gen erator 123 maps the Interlingua text 260 into the appropriate units of target language syntax to produce high quality output text 950 that requires no postediting Once the MT analysis module 127 has produced Interlin gua text 260 for a certified CSL compliant IE that interlin gua may be stored away delivered or converted immedi ately into a target language IE or into an IE in each of several target languages by the generator 123 which includes a semantics to syntax mapper and a Generation Kit Tomita M and E Nyberg The Generation Kit and Trans formation Version 3 2 User s Manual Technical Memo 1988 available from the Center for Machine Translation Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh Pa MT analyzer 127 and MT generator 123 interac
18. word or phrase in a CSL sentence for presentation to the authors by the LE The purpose of including this information in the LE DM is to help the authors ensure that their writing is made up of valid CSL words and phrases The dictionary definitions and usage examples will help the authors ensure that they are using a word or phrase of a part of speech and with a meaning that is permitted in CSL however dictionary definitions or usage examples will not be required for every CSL lexical item Rather they will be required only for the small percentage of ambiguous or vague terms whose CSL meaning will not be immediately clear to authors This probably amounts to less than half of the lexical items in the DM For example function words like for and the will not require definitions or examples many technical terms especially those with very specific technical meanings may not require definitions or examples either The non CSL synonyms in the LE DM will help authors who write a non CSL word or phrase to choose a synony mous or related CSL word or phrase with which to replace it It is desirable for the vocabulary checker to provide information about not only synonyms which are the same part of speech as the non CSL word with which they are synonymous but also about related words that might aid authors in rewording sentences If the latter are included the 5 995 920 19 LE DM must contain information about these related wor
19. 1 In a multinational multilingual business environment the information is not considered to be fully developed until it is deliverable in the various languages of the users 2 Combining the authoring and translation processes within a unified framework leads to efficiency gains that cannot otherwise be achieved FIG 1 shows a high level block diagram of the Integrated Authoring and Translation System IATS 105 The IATS 105 provides a specialized computing environment dedicated to supporting an organization in authoring documentation in one language and translat ing it into various others These two distinct functions are supported by an integrated group of programs as follows 1 Authoring one subgroup of the programs provides an interactive computerized Text Editor TE 140 which enables authors to create their monolingual text within the lexical and grammatical constraints of a domain bound subset of a natural language the subset desig nated Constrained Source Language CSL Additionally the TE 140 enables authors to further prepare the text for translation by guiding them through the process of text disambiguation which renders the text translatable without pre editing 2 Translation another subgroup of the programs pro vides the Machine Translation MI 120 function capable of translating the CSL into as many target languages as the generator module has been pro grammed to generate with the resulting translation
20. 20 2 U S Patent Nov 30 1999 Sheet 5 of 10 5 995 920 IE 410 AS VIEWED IN THE AUTHORING TOOL SHARED GRAPHICS LIBRARY 460A SHARED TABLES LIBRARY 460B SHARED TEXT LIBRARY SHARED AUDIO Mns LIBRARY 460D IE1 IES BOOK 1 IES IE7 480 IE 1 IES BOOK 2 IEG 8 485 SHARED OBJECT SHARED VIDEO LIBRARY 460 Fig 4 IE 450 AS FILED RELEASE LIBRARY IE1 IES IE9 IE2 IEG 1 10 IES IE7 IE11 IE4 IE12 470 U S Patent Nov 30 1999 Sheet 6 of 10 5 995 920 1 e SEMANTIC INFO SYNONYMS WHICH CONCEPTS RELATE WITH OTHER CONCEPTS USAGE EXAMPLES DEFINITION 2 KERNEL OBJECTS ATTRIBUTES EVENTS RELATIONSHIPS CONTEXT INFO B VERB ARGUMENT VERB CASE 220 550 500 Fig U S Patent Nov 30 1999 Sheet 7 of 10 5 995 920 TEXT 605 610 VOCABULARY SPELL CHECK CHECK 615 LEXICALLY CONSTRAINED TEXT 617 GRAMMAR CHECK 620 CSL TEXT 625 DISAMBIGUATION 630 5 TRANSLATABLE TEXT 65 Fig 6 U S Patent Nov 30 1999 Sheet 8 of 10 5 995 920 702 SELECT FIRST TERM IN UNIT IS TERM IN CSL DICTIONARY SELECT NEXT TERM THERE 714 MORE TERMS AUTHOR IN THE CORRECTS SPELLING ITEM IN CSL VOCABULARY NO THE DM HAVE A SYNONYM AUTHOR REWORDS TEXT 730 SYSTEM RUNS UNKNOWN ITEM AGAINST LE DM DISPLAY
21. A KBMT knowledge base must be able to repre sent not only a general taxonomic domain of object types such as car is a kind of vehicle a door handle is a part of a door artifacts are characterized by among other properties the property made by it must also represent knowledge about particular instances of object types e g L M can be included into the domain model as a marked instance of the object type corporation as well as instances of potentially complex event types e g the election of George Bush as president of the United States is a marked instance of the complex action to elect The 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55 60 65 16 ontological part of the knowledge base takes the form of a multihierarchy of concepts connected through taxonomy building links such as is a part of and some others We call the resulting structure a multihierarchy because concepts are allowed to have multiple parents on each link type The domain model or concept lexicon contains an onto logical model which provides uniform definitions of basic categories such as objects event types relations properties episodes etc used as building blocks for descriptions of particular domains This world model is relatively static and is organized as a multiply intercon nected network of ontological concepts The general devel opment of an ontology of an application sub world in is
22. Accordingly verb particle combinations should be rewritten wherever possible This can usually be accomplished by using a single word verb instead For example use must or need in place of have to consult in place of refer to start the motor in place of turn the motor on 5 995 920 15 Full terms and ideas should be used wherever possible This is particularly important where misunderstandings may arise For example in the phrase Use a monkey wrench to loosen the the word wrench must not be omitted While most techni cally capable people would understand the implication with out this word it must be rendered explicit during the translation process CTE text must have vocabulary which is explicitly expressed wherever possible abbreviations or shortened terms should be rewritten into lexically complete expressions Consider another example If the electrolyte density indicates that 7 Here the meaning is more explicit and complete when the idea is fully expressed If measurement of the electrolyte density indicates that 2 Finally in the following sentences have words or phrases missing the underlined words are supplied to make the meaning more redundant Turn the start switch key to OFF and remove the key Pull the backrest 1 up and move the backrest to the desired position Jump starting make sure the machines do not touch each
23. The task of the source editor is to make changes to the source text so as to bring it into conformance with what is known to be the optimal state for translation by the machine translation system This conform ance is learned by the source editor through trial and error 5 995 920 3 The pre editing process just described may go through iterations by additional source editors of increasing compe tence The source text thus prepared is submitted for pro cessing to the machine translation system The output is target language text which depending on the purposes of the translation of quality requirements of the user may or may not be post edited If the translation quality required must be comparable to that of proficient human translation the output of machine translation will most likely have to be post edited by a competent translator This is due to the complexity of human language and the comparatively modest capabilities of the machine translation systems that can be built with present technology within natural limitations of time and resources and with a reasonable expectation of meeting cost effectiveness requirements Most of the modest systems that are built require indeed the post editing activity intended to approximate by whatever measure the quality levels of purely human translation Once such system is the KBMT 89 designed by the Center for Machine Translation Carnegie Mellon University which translates English
24. US005995920A United States Patent 1 Patent Number 5 995 920 Carbonell et al 4 Date of Patent Nov 30 1999 54 COMPUTER BASED METHOD AND SYSTEM 58 Field of Search 704 1 10 395 12 FOR MONOLINGUAL DOCUMENT 395 60 63 707 530 531 532 533 DEVELOPMENT 56 References Cited 75 Inventors Jaime G Carbonell Pittsburgh Pa Sharlene L Gallup Morton Ill U S PATENT DOCUMENTS Timothy J Harris Pekin Ill James 4 661 924 4 1987 Okamoto et al 704 4 W Higdon Lacon Dennis A Hill 4 771 401 9 1988 Kaufman et al 704 9 East Peoria David C Hudson 4 821 230 4 1989 Kumano et al 704 2 Edelstein David Nasjleti Morton 4 829 423 5 1989 Tennant et al 704 9 Mervin L Rennich Dunlap 4 954 984 9 1990 Kaijima et al 704 2 Peggy M Andersen Pittsburgh Pa 5 225 981 7 1993 Yokogawa 704 9 Michael M Bauer Pittsburgh Pa 5 243 519 9 1993 Andrews 704 5 Roy F Busdiecker Pittsburgh Pa Philip J Hayes Pittsburgh Pa Alison OTHER PUBLICATIONS K Huettner Pittsburgh Bruce Carbonell et al Knowledge Based Machine Translation McLaren Pittsburgh Irene the CMU Approach Machine Translation Theoretical Nirenburg Pittsburgh Pa Eric H and Methodological Issues Pitts burgh Pa Linda M Carbonell Steps toward Knowledge Based Machine
25. ated semantic concept and part of speech for example if the word leak is in CSL as both a noun and a verb it would have two lexical entries Each lexical item will be updated with additional information required by the LE 130 and or the MT120 such as a definition and irregular morphological variants The shared K DM 510 speeds up refinements and exten sions of the CSL saves duplication of effort in the authoring and translation components and provides a human readable structure to facilitate maintenance and extensions The K DM 510 is a lexicon containing both the syntactic and semantic information about terms words and phrases in the constrained language text It is the central lexical knowledge source for the analysis side of the automated machine translation MT process The KIDM 510 is also used as the basis for the LE DM The K DM 510 includes a separate entry for each term in each syntactic category Thus for a word like truck which is both a noun and a verb there are two entries K DM entries contain the following information root e g truck part of speech e g N for content words the concept or meaning e g O TRUCK morphological information e g irregular inflections syntactic information e g whether a noun is count or mass definitional information short definitions and textual examples documenting the different senses and uses of the words and a specification of the sense
26. ates the disambiguated constrained text 240 into interlingua 260 The interlingua 260 is in turn translated by generator block 270 into the target text 280 As shown in FIG 3 the interlingua text 260 is in a form that can be translated to multiple target languages 306 310 By requiring and enabling the author to create documents that conform to specific vocabulary and grammatical constraints it is feasible to perform the accurate translation of constrained language texts to foreign languages with no postediting required Postediting is not required since the LE vocabulary check block 217 and analysis block 230 have caused the author to modify and or disambiguate all possibly ambiguous sentences and all non translatable words from the document before translation DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF THE FUNCTIONAL BLOCKS In a preferred embodiment each author will have sole use of a DECstation with 32 Meg of RAM a 400 megabyte disk drive and a 19 inch color monitor Each workstation will be configured for at least 100 Meg of swap from its local disk In addition to the authors workstations DECservers will be 5 995 920 7 used as file servers one for every two authoring groups for a total of no more than 45 users per file server Furthermore authoring workstations will reside on an Ethernet local network The system uses the Unix operating system a Berkeley Standard Distribution BSD derivative is prefer able to a System V SYSV deri
27. atically by the FMS 110 The precise set of MT processes running at a given time and their distribution across machines is determined by the FMS 110 which will modify the mix according to the set of translation jobs outstanding at any particular time Referring to FIG 9 the CSL Analyzer 127 consists of two interconnected components a syntactic parser 910 and a semantic interpreter 920 Semantic interpreter 920 is also known in the art as a mapping rule interpreter The syntactic parser 910 obtains the CSL text 305 input and produces a syntactic structure for it The syntactic parser 910 uses an LFG type grammar Lexical Functional Grammar LFG is a formalized grammar which is well known in the art of machine translation As a result the resultant syntactic structure is LFG f structure 960 As soon as the f structure for the CSL sentence 960 is created the semantic interpreter 920 starts applying mapping rules in order to substitute source language lexical units and syntactic con structions with their interlingua translations Lexical units map into instances of domain concepts e g the word data will map into the interlingua information while syntactic structures map into conceptual relations e g subjects of sentences often map into the agent relations in interlingua See Mitamura The Hierarchical Organization of Predicate Frames for Interretive Mapping in Natural Language Processing Center for Machine Tran
28. be success fully parsed by the MT Analysis module 127 The parsing may fail for reasons including but not limited to those listed below The sentence includes grammatical constructions which the analysis module 127 will not parse Such is the case for instance when the sentence contains a reduced relative clause The reduction results from deleting the relative pronoun that and the verb be in a sentence like Don t change the values that are programmed into the unit Author s Input When Checked Don t change the values programmed into the unit grammar checker Message This sentence is difficult to parse Please check for one of the following problems Then the grammar checker 620 goes on to list the typical and most frequent situations where parsing is made difficult if not impossible through the use of grammatical construc tions not included in the repertoire of CSL The punctuation usage in the sentence does not con form to CSL restrictions As noted above punctua tion marks and special characters which are not part of CSL in any context will be flagged by the Vocabu lary Checker 610 However the Vocabulary Checker 5 995 920 25 610 does not parse input so it will not report cases in which such an element exists in CSL but has been used in the wrong context This kind of case will trigger a fail response from the Grammar Checker 620 ACSL vocabulary word was used in a syntactic form that i
29. cal units and syntactic constructions of the target language Interlin gua MT systems as well as other types of MT systems are well known in the art Detailed descriptions of these differ 5 10 15 20 25 35 40 45 50 55 60 65 26 ent approaches to machine translation can be found in Hutchins Machine Translation Past Present Future Ellis Horwood Ltd Chichester UK 1986 and Zarechnak The History of Machine Translation in Henisz Dostert McDonald Zarechnak eds Machine Translation Trends in Linguistics Studies and Monographs Vol 11 The Hague Mouton 1979 both of which are herein incorporated by reference in their entirety The meaning of the CSL text 350 is represented in the specially designed knowledge representation scheme called interlingua which is well known in the art Interlingua is in turn represented in a frame notation and thus can be viewed as a kind of semantic network Like other artificial or formal languages interlingua has its own lexicon and syntax The lexicon is based on the domain from which the translated texts are taken e g computer maintenance space exploration etc Thus interlingua nouns are object concepts in the ontology interlingua verbs correspond roughly to events in the ontology and interlingua adjec tives and adverbs are the various properties defined in the ontology The ontology forms a densely connected network for the
30. constrained text However the system will operate properly even if totally unconstrained text is entered from the start The author s communication with the LE 130 consists of mouse click or keystroke commands However one should note that other forms of input may be used such as but not limited to the use of a stylus voice etc without changing the scope or function of the present invention An example of an input is a command to perform a CSL check or to find the definition and usage example for a given word or phrase The CSL text that may contain residual ambiguity or stylistic problems is analyzed for conformity with CSL and checked for compliance with the grammatical rules con tained in the knowledge bases as shown in block 230 The author is provided feedback to correct any mistakes via feedback line 215 Specifically the LE 130 provides infor mation regarding non CSL words and phrases and sentences to the author 160 Finally the text is checked for any ambiguous sentences The LE prompts the author to select an appropriate interpretation of a sentence s meaning This process is repeated until the text is fully disambiguated Once the author has made all the necessary corrections to the text and the analysis phase 230 has completed the disambiguated constrained text 240 is passed to the MT analyzer and interpreter 250 The interpreter resides in the MT analyzer 127 together with the syntactic part of the analyzer and transl
31. d text and responsively save said at least one unambigu ous constrained information element for later use and wherein said language editor comprises a vocabulary checker for checking said input text against a permitted lexicon and suggesting alternatives 7 A computer based system for monolingual document development comprising a text editor adapted to accept interactively from an author input text written in a source language a language editor which is an extension of said text editor which interactively enforces lexical and grammatical 5 995 920 31 constraints on a natural language subset used by said author to create said input text wherein said author is interactively aided in enforcing said lexical and gram matical constraints on said input text so as to produce unambiguous constrained text and to produce at least one unambiguous constrained information element from at least a portion of said unambiguous constrained text and responsively save said at least one unambigu ous constrained information element for later use and means for marking with a tag a portion of said input text which has been rendered unambiguous constrained text by said interactive enforcement wherein said tag indi cates a linguistic characteristic of said portion of said input text 8 The system of claim 7 wherein said system for monolingual document development operates in a transla tion server environment which allows multiple authors
32. ds in addition to the mandatory content E Language Editor Referring to FIG 1 5 the constrained language editor LE 130 is a set of tools to support authors and editors in creating documents within the bounds of CSL These tools will help an author to use the appropriate CSL vocabulary and grammar to write service documentation The LE 130 is built as an extension of the SGML text editor 140 Although the LE 130 uses the same communication chan nels as the SGML text editor 140 the functions of the two are mutually exclusive However the user interface used to interact with the LE 130 is a seamless extension of the SGML text editor interface The author 160 creates documents in the SGML text editor 140 and invokes the LE 130 The LE 130 informs the author whether individual words in a document are non CSL and will be able to suggest synonyms in CSL for words that are relevant to the user application information domain but are not in CSL In addition the LE 130 tells the author whether or not the text in a file satisfies CSL syntactic constraints The LE 130 software includes the following a Vocabulary Checker a Grammar Checker including an interface through the MT Syntactic Analyzer which will provide the core grammar checking functionality and a User Interface UD In addition the CSL vocabulary information used by the CSL LE will be represented in the K DM and the LE DM The LE 130 will certify that all vocabu
33. e collection of words and phrases used in a particular language or sublanguage A limited domain will be referred to by means of a limited vocabulary which is used to communicate or express information about a 5 995 920 13 limited realm of experience example of a limited domain might be farming where the limited vocabulary would include terms concerning farm equipment and activities The MT component will operate on more than one kind of vocabulary The words and phrases for machine translation will be stored in the MT lexicon The vocabulary can be divided into different classes 1 functional items 2 general content items and 3 technical nomenclature Functional items in English are the single words and word combinations which serve primarily to connect ideas in a sentence They are required for almost any type of written communication in English This class includes prepositions to from with in front of etc conjunctions and but or if when because since while etc determiners the a your most of pronouns it something anybody etc some adverbs no never always not slowly etc and auxiliary verbs should may ought must etc General content words are used in large measure to describe the world around us their main use is to reflect the usual and common human experience Typically documents focus on a very specialized part of the human experience e g machines and their upkeep As s
34. e injector timing mechanism should be checked a word or phrase which must appear within double quotation marks in CSL but which is not enclosed in quotation marks in the current context in this case the Vocabulary Checker 610 will report that the term should be quoted Author s Input When Checked For more details read the Testing and Adjusting article in the next section VC Message This term is generally enclosed by quotes CSL Alternative None CSL Sentence as Edited For more details read the Testing and Adjusting article in the next section a word or phrase which must appear with specific mandatory capitalization in CSL but which lacks that capitalization in the current context e g an acronym presented in lower case in this case the Vocabulary Checker 610 will report the correct CSL form s Author s Input When Checked Turn the screw until the pressure gauge reads 0 ka 0 psi VC Message The term is improperly capitalized CSL Alternative kPa CSL Sentence as Edited Turn the screw until the pressure gauge reads 0 kPa 0 psi a non word that is a group of letters representing a misspelled word that has known spelling alterna tives in this case the Vocabulary Checker 610 will identify the spelling alternatives regardless of whether the result is in CSL the user will resubmit the chosen alternative for further checking Author s Input When Checked When it is necesary to raise the boom the b
35. each language and will consist primarily of a set of knowledge sources designed to guide the translation of Interlingua text to foreign language text In particular for every new target language a new MT generator 123 must be individually developed When fully functional the LE 130 will sometimes need to ask the author 160 to choose from alternative interpretations for certain sentences that satisfy CSL grammatical con straints but for which the meaning is unclear This process is known as disambiguation After the LE 130 has determined that a particular part of text uses only CSL vocabulary and satisfies all CSL grammatical constrains then the text will be labeled CSL approved pending this disambiguation As explained below disambiguation will not require any changes to the author visible aspects of the text After the text has been disambiguated it will be ready for translation into the target language 180 In practice the LE 130 is built as an extension to the text editor 140 which provides the basic word processing func tionality required by authors and editors to create text and tables The graphics editor 150 is used for creating graphics The graphics editor 150 provides a means for accessing the text labels on graphics through the text editor 140 so these text labels can be CSL approved as well The LE 130 via text editor 140 communicates with the MT analyzer 127 and through it with the DM 137 during disambiguation via bidi
36. eneral centers around American English analogous comparisons can be made in connection with all other languages There is nothing inherent about the system 100 described herein that requires American English to be the source language In fact the system 100 is not designed to work with American English as the only source language However the databases e g the domain model that interact with the LE 130 and MT 120 will have to be changed to correspond to the constraints of the particular source language The rules of standard American English orthography must be followed Non standard spellings such as thru for through moulding for molding or hodometer for odometer are to be avoided Capitalized words e g On ff Value Planned Repair should only be used to indicate special meaning of terms These terms must be listed in the user application vocabulary Such is also the case for non standard capitalization usage BrakeSaver Likewise abbreviations when used ROPS API PIN must be listed in the user application specific vocabulary The format for numbers units of measurement and dates must be consis tent Constrained language recovery items should also be used according to their constrained language meaning In doing so the writer assures that the MT always translates a word by using the proper constrained language word sense Some English words can also belong to more than one syntactic ca
37. get lan guage as his her native tongue and subsequently have learned the source language Such an approach was felt to result in the most accurate and efficient translation Even the most expert translator must take a considerable amount of time to translate a page of text For example it is estimated that an expert translator translating technical text from English to Japanese can only translate approximately 300 words approximately one page per hour It can thus be seen that the amount of time and effort required to translate a document particularly a technical one is extensive The requirements for translation in business and com merce has grown steadily in the last hundred years This is due to several factors One is the rapid increase in the text associated with conducting business internationally Another Un 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55 60 65 2 is the large number of languages that such texts must be translated into in order for a company to engage in global commerce A third is the rapid pace of commerce which has resulted in frequent revisions of text documents which requires subsequent translation of new versions Many organizations have the responsibility for creating and distributing information in multiple languages In the global marketplace the manufacture must ensure that the manuals are widely available in the host languages of their target markets Manual translation of docume
38. he appropriate CSL vocabulary and grammar to write their documents The LE 130 communicates with the author 160 and vice versa via the text editor 140 The author has bidirectional communication via line 162 with the text editor 140 The LE 130 informs the author 160 whether words and phrases that are used are in CSL The LE 130 is able to suggest synonyms in CSL for words that are relevant to the domain of information which includes this document but are not in CSL In addition the LE 130 tells an author 160 whether or not a piece of text satisfies CSL grammatical constraints It also provides an author with support in disambiguating sentences that may be syntactically correct but are semantically ambiguous The MT 120 is divided into two parts a MT analyzer 127 and a MT generator 123 The MT analyzer 127 serves two purposes it analyzes a document to ensure that the docu ment unambiguously conforms to CSL and produces inter lingua text The analyzed CSL approved text is then trans lated into a selected foreign target language 180 The MT 120 utilizes an Interlingua based translation approach Instead of directly translating a document to another foreign language the MT generator 123 transforms the document into a language independent computer readable form called Interlingua and then generates translations from the Inter lingua text As a result translated documents will require no postediting A version of the MT 120 is created for
39. in which the word is to be used in the constrained language The DM 500 is defined in three sets of external human readable files which can be read by the process es that require their use Since the MT 120 and the LE 130 will be running in separate processes the information in the model is represented internally in two forms one for the parts of the DM required by the MT 120 and another for the part 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55 60 65 18 required by the LE 130 So the KIDM 510 is defined in a set of files which can be represented in both forms the LEIDM 530 is only represented in the form used by the LE 130 and the MT DM 520 is only represented in the form used by the MT 120 Described below are the external file fonnats the content of the various parts of the DM and the internal representation of the information used by the LE 130 Once again the K DM contains all information required by both the MT 120 and the LE 130 This includes a CSL lexical item the base word phrase or quoted term and a semantic concept the semantic concept associated with the lexical item represented in a lexical entry by a concept name Further it includes a part of speech one of a fixed set of parts of speech e g verb adjective etc a definition a rough definition for general vocabulary terms to clarify which of several senses a CSL lexical item may have and irregular morphological variants a listi
40. itecture of the present invention FIG 2 is a high level flowchart of the operation of the present invention FIG 3 is a high level informational flow and architectural block diagram of MT 120 FIG 4 shows an example of an information element Figure S is a block diagram of the domain model 500 FIG 6 is a high level flow diagram of the operation of the language editor 130 FIG 7 is a flow diagram illustrating the operation of the vocabulary checker 610 FIG 8 is a high level flow diagram of the disambiguation block 630 FIG 9 is an informational flow and architectural block diagram of MT 120 5 10 15 20 35 40 55 60 65 4 DETAILED DESCRWIION OF THE PRESENT INVENTION I INTEGRATED SYSTEM OVERVIEW The computer based system of the present invention provides functional integration of 1 An authoring environment for the development of documents and 2 A module for accurate machine translation into mul tiple languages without pre or post editing Utilizing this technology in the production of multilingual documentation the user is assured of consistently accurate timely cost efficient translation whether in small or large volumes and with virtually simultaneous release of infor mation in both the source language and the languages targeted for translation The decision to link the source language authoring func tion together with the translation function is based on two principles
41. lary and sentence structures in a document conform to the CSL specification The LE 130 marks the document with an SGML tag that represents this CSL approval Checking must be performed on all text in a document which includes the following sentences headings list items captions call outs in graphics and information in tables Since the present invention is based on the premise that authors should be productive as possible during a CSL checking session and that authors should not have to work multiple authoring documents at once a batch mode of operation which requires a user to submit a document for processing and wait until the entire document is finished before he or she gets any feedback is not appropriate The LE 130 provides an interactive mode of operation for both vocabulary checking grammar checking and interactive disambiguation FIG 6 shows a high level flow chart of the operation of the LE 130 The LE 130 takes in as input text 605 which may be ambiguous and unconstrained The potentially ambiguous unconstrained input text 605 is first checked with a vocabulary checker 610 which performs its functions as described below with the aid of a spell checker 615 The services of the spell checker happen to be rendered in this embodiment by the spell checker regularly featured by the host TE 140 Once the vocabulary checker 610 has com pleted its check and made all necessary corrections with the aid of the author then the
42. manipulate the syntactic and semantic struc tures of a parse and moreover to generate these structures simultaneously The universal parser 910 produces all the possible that is valid f structures that can be derived from the sentences parsed Each of these syntactic f structures has semantic features in accordance with LFG theory these features are created at the same time as the rest of the syntactic f structure The semantic component may thus be regarded as an additional feature of f structures Thus the semantic component is a visible part of the syntactic parse The approach of simultaneously creating the syntactic and semantic structures has produced a system able to eliminate meaningless partial parses before com pleting them Semantics are added to the syntactic structure when the lexicon is accessed for the definition of a word Another part of the definition of a word is a set of structural mapping rules These mapping rules are used when syntactic equations in grammar rules add infirmation to a syntactic structure The text language generator component 123 takes inter lingua text 260 as its input and produces a target language 5 995 920 29 text 950 as its output The target language generator 123 consist of two major modules one semantic and one syn tactic The semantic performs the function of target language lexical selection and choice of target language syntactic constructions it is aided in these
43. may vary widely depending on the purpose of development of the constrained sublanguage In view of the above the present invention limits the authoring of documents within the bounds of a constrained language A constrained language is a sublanguage of a source language e g American English developed for the domain of a particular user application For a discussion generally of constrained or controlled languages see Adri aens et al From COGRAM to ALCOGRAM Toward a controlled English Grammar Checker Proc of Coling 92 Nantes Aug 23 28 1992 which is incorporated by refer ence In the context of machine translation the goals of the constrained language are as follows 1 To facilitate consistent authoring of source documents and to encourage clear and direct writing and 10 15 20 30 35 40 45 50 55 60 65 12 2 To provide a principled framework for source texts that will allow fast accurate and high quality machine translation of user documents The set of rules that authors must follow to ensure that the grammar of what they write conforms to CSL will be referred to as CSL Grammatical Constraints The computa tional implementation of CSL grammatical constraints used to analyze CSL texts in the MT component will be referred to as the CSL Functional Grammar based on the well known formalisms developed by Martin Kay and later modified by R Kaplan and J Bresnan see Kay M Parsing
44. n and SGML tags to recognize translatability units in the source input text e g an SGML tag is necessary to identify section titles 2 shielding insulating units that will not be translated Although the system is based on the premise that all words and sentences will belong to the constrained 10 15 20 25 30 45 60 65 8 language that cannot be predicted in advance for example names and addresses or classes of vocabu lary that cannot readily be exhaustively specified for example part numbers error messages from machinery SGML tags can be put around these items to indicate to the system that they are exempt from checking 3 identifying contents e g part number as discussed in 2 4 allowing partial sentences to be translated e g bul leted items 5 assisting in translating tables one cell at a time by identifying structure of text This feature is similar to that described in 1 6 assisting the parsing process described below through 2 3 4 5 7 assisting in disambiguation by providing a means of inserting invisible tags into the source text so as to indicate the correct interpretation of an ambiguous sentence 8 assisting in translating currencies and mathematical units through the identification of specific types of text that require special treatment 9 providing a means of labeling a portion of text as translatable In other words certifying that a p
45. nd which of several possible senses is intended in a given sentence For many words the system can eliminate some ambiguity by recognizing the part of speech of the word as used in a particular sentence noun verb adjective etc This is possible because each definition of a word is par ticular to the use of that word as a certain part of speech as indicated above for leak However to avoid the kinds of ambiguity that the MT 120 cannot eliminate the CSL specification strives to include a single one sense of a word or phrase for each part of speech Thus when a word or phrase is in CSL it can be used in CSL in at least one of its possible senses For example an author writing in CSL may be allowed to use leak in senses 1 and 3 above but not in sense 2 Saying that a word or phrase is in CSL does not mean that all possible uses of the word or phrase can be translated If a word or phrase is in CSL then all forms of that word or phrase that can express its CSL sense s are also in CSL In the above example an author may use not only the verb leak but also the related verb forms leaked leaking and leaks If a word or phrase with a noun sense is part of CSL both its singular and plural forms may be used Note however phrases which function as more than one part of speech are uncommon This heuristic is therefore less rel evant in the case of an ambiguous phrase A vocabulary is th
46. ng excellence has led to the implementation of various disciplines designed to bring the authoring process under control Yet authors of varied capabilities and backgrounds cannot comfortably be made to fit a uniform skill standard Writing guidelines rules and standards are elusive difficult to define and enforce Efforts aimed at both standardizing and improving on the quality of writing tend to meet with mixed results However achieved and however successful these results push up documenta tion authoring costs Recent attempts at surrounding authors with the software environment that might enhance their productivity and the quality of their writing have only succeeded in providing spell checkers The effectiveness of other writing software has so far been disappointingly weak When the need to deliver information calls for the cross ing of linguistic frontiers the challenges multiply The organization that needs to clear a channel for its information flow finds itself to a great extent if not totally dependent on translation Translation of text from one language to another language has been done for hundreds of years Prior to the advent of computers such translation was done completely manually by experts called translators who were fluent in the lan guage of the original text source text and in the language of the translated text target text Typically it was preferable for the translator to have originally learned the tar
47. ng of irregular morphological forms and the name of the morpho logical transformations for each Examples of names of morphological transformations for verbs are past third person singular present past participle present parti ciple The value of this field for the word drive for example would be past drove past participle driven indicating that those two forms of the verbs are irregular and all other forms are regular Finally the KIDM includes typographical restrictions e g if the lexical item must be in all capitals have the first character capitalized etc The MT DM 520 contains information required only by the MT 120 This includes selectional restrictions on con cepts and hierarchical classification of concepts for organi zation and inheritance of selectional restrictions The LE DM 530 will contain non CSL synonyms to help the authors to choose valid CSL lexical items Together the Kernel and the LE DM will contain all information and all restrictions required to characterize the CSL lexicon in support of the LE Vocabulary Checker described below The LEIDM contains additional information required only by the LE Vocabulary Checker This includes a dictionary definition the definition of the word or phrase that will be presented to authors by the LE non CSL synonyms synonyms for the CSL lexical items that authors might use in writing documents and a usage example an example of the
48. nomena the language represents A sublanguage covers the range of objects processes and relations within a limited domain Yet a sublanguage may be limited in its lexicon while it may not necessarily be limited in the power of its grammar Under controlled situations a strategy aimed at facilitating machine translation is that of constraining both the lexicon and the grammar of the sublanguage Constraints on the lexicon limit its size by avoiding synonyms and control lexical ambiguity by specializing the lexical units for the expression of as far as possible one meaning per unit It is easy to imagine how these restrictions would avoid the problems exemplified in 1 2 and 4 above Grammatical constraints may simply rule out processes like pronominalization 6 above or require that the intended meaning be made clearer either through addition or repeti tion of otherwise redundant information or through rewrite The following example sets the parameters for application of this requirement Unconstrained ambiguous English which can be inter preted as either A B1 or B2 below Clean the connecting rod and main bearings nambiguous English version A Clean the connecting rod bearings and the main bear ings Unambiguous English version B1 Clean the main bearings and the connecting rod Unambiguous English version B2 Clean the main bearings and the connecting rods The number and types of lexical and grammatical con straints
49. nowledge Based Machine Translation Carnegie Mellon Center for Mach Trans Tomita Generation Kit and Transformation Kit Version 3 2 User s Manual Carnegie Mellon Center for Mach Translation CMU CMT 88 Memo Tomita The Generalized LR Parser Compiler Version 8 1 User s Guide Carnegie Mellon Center for Mach Trans lation Paper No CMU CMT 88 Memo U S Patent Nov 30 1999 Sheet 1 of 10 5 995 920 INTEGRATED AUTHORING AND TRANSLATION SYSTEM Fig 1A 5 995 920 Sheet 2 of 10 Nov 30 1999 U S Patent 091 mu MOHLRV ge b cecus E 7 j 39 1X31 1 3 1 YOLVYSNIO 7 1 i ER GILVISNVUL 179110 ee og 398008 081 a eee 101 Ho tl Pd 021 U S Patent Nov 30 1999 Sheet 3 of 10 5 995 920 AUTHOR 160 SOURCE CORRECTED TEXT J 220 CHECK VOCABULARY ANALYZE 230 DISAMBIGUATED CONSTRAINED TEXT J 77 240 INTERPRET 50 INTERLINGUA 260 GENERATE 270 TARGET TEXT 280 215 217 FIg 2 U S Patent Nov 30 1999 Sheet 4 of 10 5 995 920 CSL TEXT 305 ANALYSIS 427 INTERLINGUA 260 123A 123B 123C TARGET TEXT TARGET TEXT TARGET TEXT aig AUR GENERATOR GENERATOR 2 3 TARGET TEXT 1 TARGET TEXT 2 TARGET TEXT 3 306 308 310 1
50. nput text until said source input text has been modified into a constrained source text 15 20 25 30 35 40 50 55 65 30 4 checking for syntactic grammatical errors and seman tic ambiguities in said constrained source text 5 providing interactive feedback to said author to remove said syntactic grammatical errors and said semantic ambiguities in said constrained source text to produce unambiguous constrained text 6 producing at least one unambiguous constrained infor mation element from at least a portion of said unam biguous constrained text and 7 saving said at least one unambiguous constrained information element for later use 2 A method as set forth in claim 1 wherein said step of providing interactive feedback includes the step of marking with a tag a portion of said input text in response to user input wherein said tag indicates a linguistic characteristic of said portion of said input text 3 A method as set forth in claim 1 wherein said input text includes label text associated with a graphic file 4 A method as set forth in claim 3 wherein said step of providing interactive feedback including the step of marking with a tag based on input by an author said label text wherein said tag indicates a linguistic characteristic of said portion of said input text 5 A computer based system for monolingual document development comprising a text editor adapted to accept interactively
51. nts into foreign languages is a costly time consuming and inefficient pro cess Translations are usually inconsistent owing to the individual interpretation of the translators who are not necessarily well versed in the application specific language used in the documentation Because of these problems fewer manuals than would be ideal are actually translated In the areas of research and development the explosion of knowledge which has occurred in the last century has also geometrically increased the need for the translation of documents No longer is there one predominant language for documents in a particular field of research and development Typically such research and development activities are taking place in several advanced industrialized countries such as for example the United States United Kingdom Frence Germany and Japan Many times there are addi tional languages containing important documents relating to the particular area of research and development Advances in technology particularly in electronics and computers have further accelerated the production of text in all languages The ability to produce text is directly proportional to the capability of the technology that is used When documents had to be hand written for example an author could only produce a certain number of words per unit of time This increased significantly however with the advent of mechanical devices such as typewriters mimeograph machine
52. obtains for instance between the concept hat and the concept costume where the hat is a part of the costume The same relationship obtains between the concept sole and the concept shoe heel and shoe etc The semantic information A held in the DM MT 520 identifies this and other semantic relationships between the concepts in the domain When the process in the MT analyzer 127 goes to the DM MT 520 for semantic information concerning the rela tionship between the concept valve and the concept lever The information in the DM 137 will not enable the MT analyzer 127 to tell whether lever is a part of valve the knowledge about such relationship is just not there So the MT analyzer 127 is still at a loss as to whether the phrase with the lever should be attached to the word valve Now when the MT analyzer 127 turns to the contextual information 3 it finds that the verb remove takes three cases a nominative NOM an accusative ACC and an instrumental INS at a deeper level of analysis however than that of the Latin grammar of our school days That is remove fits in the following case frame vers NOM ACC INS Based this abstract pattern we can build sentences such as the following NOM VERB ACC INS The workman removed the sand with a shovel Peter has removed the box with the nail etc As the DM MT contains information about
53. oom must have correct support VC Message The term is non CSL CSL Alternative necessary CSL Sentence as Edited When it is necessary to raise the boom the boom must have correct support a word that is not in CSL and about which the system knows nothing The message for an unknown word or phrase gives the author the opportunity to change the wording altogether or shield the illegal expres sion from checking as the case may require In the following example the author uses an SGML tag to tell the system to overlook the offensive language and leave it intact Author s Input When Checked Put approximately 0 9 L 1 quart of SAE10W hydraulic oil in the nitrogen end of the accumulator VC Message The term is unknown CSL Alternative None CSL Sentence as Edited Put approximately 0 9 L 1 quart of lt sic gt SAE10W lt sic gt hydraulic oil in the nitrogen end of accumulator a punctuation mark or special symbol that is not allowed in CSL in any context In cases where a non CSL word has no direct CSL synonyms that is words that could replace it directly in a document the system can identify related CSL words or 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55 60 65 22 phrases which an author could use to express the intended idea This functionality provides authors with additional support in rewording a sentence to include only CSL vocabulary However changes to use these related words could not be com
54. options allow the author to initiate and view feedback from CSL checking both vocabulary and grammar checking and from vocabulary look up The author can request that checking be initiated on the currently displayed document or request vocabulary look up on a given word or phrase The UI will clearly indicate each instance of non CSL language found in the document Possible ways of indicating non CSL language include the use of color and changes to font type or size in the SGML Editor window The UI will display all known information regarding any non CSL word For example in appropriate cases the UI will display a message saying that the word is non CSL but has CSL synonyms as well as a list of those synonyms In cases where a Vocabulary Checker report includes a list of alternatives to the non CSL word in focus for example spelling alternatives or CSL synonyms the author will be able to select one of those alternatives and request that it be automatically replaced in the document In some cases the author may have to modify 1 add the appropriate ending the selected alternative to ensure that it is in the appropriate form When an author requests vocabulary information the UI will display spelling alternatives synonyms a definition and or a usage example for the item indicated The author can move quickly and easily between checker information and vocabulary look up information inside the UI This enables the author to perfo
55. ortion of text has advanced through the process outlined below and that the text is unambiguous constrained text that can be translated without postediting In the past authors have created by way of the text editor 140 electronic documents text only no graphics that represented a complete book This implies that all work is done by one writer and that the information created is not easily reused The present invention however compiles or creates books manuals documents from a set of smaller pieces or information elements which implies that the work can be done by multiple writers The result of this invention is enhanced reusability An information element is defined as the smallest stand alone piece of service information about a specialized domain It should be noted however that although a preferred embodiment utilizes information elements the present invention can produce accurate unam biguous translated documents without the use of information elements FIG 4 shows an example of an information element 410 which includes a unique heading 415 a unique block of text 420 a shared graphic 430 a shared table 435 and a shared block of test 425 Unique information is that information which applies only to the information element in which it s contained This implies that the unique information is filed as part of the information element 450 A shared object a graphic
56. other When such gaps are filled the idea is more complete and a meaningful translation by IATS 105 becomes more certain Translation errors due to gaps are a common reason for postediting Hence gaps are disallowed Colloquial or spoken English often favors the use of very general words This may sometimes result in a degree of vagueness which must be resolved during the translation process For example words such as conditions remove facilities procedure go do is for make get etc are correct but imprecise In a sentence like When the temperature reaches 32 you must take special precautions the word reaches does not communicate whether the temperature is dropping or rising one of these two terms would be more exact here and the text just as readable Some languages make distinctions where English does not always do so for example we say oil for either a lubricating fluid or one used for combustion we say fuel whether or not it is diesel Similarly when the word door is used in isolation it is not always possible to tell what kind of door is meant A car door A building door A compart ment door Other languages may need to make these dis tinctions Wherever possible full terms should be used in English D Domain Model Knowledge based Machine Translation KBMT must be supported by world knowledge and by linguistic semantic knowledge about meanings of lexical units and their com binations
57. pleted with the automatic replacement facility provided for synonyms since the changes would require some modifications to the sentence structure For example if can was in CSL and capable was not an author who wrote the following sentence The system is capable of being programmed for several customer specified parameters would be told that capable capable was not a CSL word Although the word can can is CSL neither the word capable nor the phrase is capable of is capable of can be directly replaced with can without the need for further changes to the sentence 2 Grammar Checker The purpose of the Grammar Checker is to identify places where an author s text does not conform to CSL grammati cal restrictions and to focus the author s attention on those places The grammar checker 620 functionality will be provided by the Analysis module 127 of the MT system 120 extended to allow the system to report instances of syntactic and semantic ambiguity The grammar checker interface allows the author to respond interactively to requests for clarification of ambiguity It is possible that a sentence can be a constrained language but that it may have more than one interpretation The grammar checker interface will present some indication of the two or more possible meanings of the sentence to the author and request clarification An example of an ambiguous sentence would be Check the cylinders on the inside
58. r 610 displays spelling alternatives as shown in block 726 The item is then checked to determine whether it is in the CSL vocabulary as shown in block 734 If the item is in the CSL vocabulary then the procedure advances to block 718 However if the item is not in the CSL vocabulary the system checks to see if the LEIDM contains a synonym for the item being checked as shown in block 736 If at least one synonym exists in the LE DM the system displays the synonym s which are part of the CSL vocabulary and allows the author to make a selection as shown in block 738 However should the LE DM not have a synonym for the item under checking the author has the opportunity to rework her input as shown in block 740 The outcome of this rework goes back to block 710 Once a legal selection has been made by the author the procedure 700 then proceeds to block 718 When a non CSL word is identified the author has the following options she can select an alternative and substi tute it for the word in the document or she can enter a new item and substitute it for the word in the document Typically the author selects one of the synonyms to replace the non CSL item If the author should decide to skip the problem the lack of resolution would result in failure of the text to be approved as CSL Block 718 checks to determine whether there are any more terms in the unit If there are no more terms the procedure 700 stops Otherwise the next term
59. rectional socket to socket lines In the preferred embodiment of the present invention the DM is one of the knowledge bases that feeds the MT analyzer 127 The DM 137 is a symbolic representation of the declarative knowledge about the CSL vocabulary used by the MT analyzer 127 and the LE 130 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55 60 65 6 FIG 2 shows a high level flowchart of the operation of IATS 105 The MT 120 LE 130 text editor 140 and graphics editor 150 are all controlled by the FMS 110 Control lines 111 113 provide the necessary control infor mation for proper operation of IATS 105 Initially the author 160 will use the FMS 110 to choose a document to edit and the FMS 110 will start the text editor 140 displaying the file for the specified document Via the text editor 140 the author enters text that may be uncon strained and ambiguous text into the IATS 105 as shown in blocks 160 and 220 The author 160 will use standard editor commands to create and modify the document until it is ready to be checked for CSL compliance Note that is it anticipated that authors will mostly enter text that is sub stantially prepared with the CSL constraints in mind The text will then be modified by the author in response to system feedback based on violations to the pre determined lexical and grammatical constraints to conform to the CSL This is of course much more efficient than initially entering totally un
60. rm information searches e g synonym look up during the process of changing the documents to remove non CSL language In most cases the UI provides automatic replacement of non CSL vocabulary with CSL vocabulary with no need for 10 15 20 25 35 40 55 60 65 10 the user to modify the CSL word to ensure that it is in the appropriate form However there are some cases in which the vocabulary checker described below which does no parsing of a document will not be able to identify the correct form to provide Consider the following caption in the case where the verb view is not in CSL but has the CSL synonym see Direction of Crankshaft Rotation when viewed from flywheel end The Vocabulary Checker will not know if saw or seen should be offered as a synonym for viewed Of course in this case a reasonable course of action might be to offer both possibilities and allow the author to choose the appropriate one Because there is no certainty that every case will allow a presentation that enables the author to order a direct replacement LE 130 provides a list of replacement options in the correct form where possible There may be cases though when the author will find it necessary to edit a suggested CSL word or phrase before requesting that it be put into the document Finally the LE UI provides support for disambiguating the meaning of sentences It does this by providing a li
61. s and printing presses The advent of electronic computer and optical technology increased the capability of the author even further Today an average author can produce significantly more text in a given unit of time than any author could produce using the hand written methods of the past This rapid increase in the amount of text coupled with enormous advances in technology has caused considerable attention to be paid to the subject of translation of text from its source language to a target language s Considerable research has been done in universities as well as in private and governmental laboratories which has been devoted to trying to figure out how translation can be accomplished without the intervention of a human translator Computer based systems have been devised which attempt to perform machine translation MT Such com puter systems are programmed so as to attempt to automati cally translate source text as an input into target text as an output However researchers have discovered that such computer systems for automatic machine translation are impossible to implement using present technology and theo retical understanding No system exists today which can perform the machine translation of a source natural language to a target natural language without some type of editing by expert editors translators One method is discussed below In a process called pre editing source text is initially reviewed by a source editor
62. s not recognized for that word in CSL The Vocabulary Checker 610 will flag some of these cases for example if the word test is included in CSL as a noun but not as a verb the Vocabulary Checker will report that the past form tested is not CSL However the Vocabulary Checker 610 will allow the present verb form tests to pass since that form is identical to the plural CSL noun tests This case will trigger a fail response from the Grammar Checker 620 The Grammar Checker 620 uses the MT Analysis module 127 and the domain model 137 to identify sentences that do not conform to CSL grammatical constraints this is known as syntactical analysis and is shown in block 805 For each such sentence the Grammar Checker 620 reports that the sentence is not CSL It is also possible for a sentence to be in CSL but be ambiguous Consequently the present invention provides semantic analysis as shown in block 710 If the sentence being checked is not semantically ambiguous the disambiguation checker 630 will present some indication of the two or more possible meanings to the author and request clarification as shown in blocks 815 and 825 In a preferred embodiment when a sentence fails the Grammar Checker 620 and or the disambiguation checker 630 the author has the following options edit the document in cases of an ambiguous reading disambiguate the sentence recheck the same input or continue checking without editing Note that the present
63. sage This will include a number of technical borrowings from English general words such as truck or length The vast majority of the constrained language vocabulary then will consist of the special e g technical terms of one or more words which express the objects and processes of the special domain To the extent that the vocabulary is able to express the full range of notions about the special domain the vocabulary is said to be complete The development of a streamlined but complete vocabu lary contributes greatly to the success of the IATS system 105 The constrained language by specifying proper and improper use of vocabulary will assure that the documents can be produced in a manner conducive to fast accurate and high quality machine translation Vocabulary items should reflect clear ideas and be appro priate for the target readership Terms which are sexist colloquial idiomatic overly complicated or technical obscure or which in other ways inhibit communication 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55 60 65 14 should be avoided These and other generally accepted stylistic considerations while not necessarily mandatory for MT oriented processing are nevertheless important guide lines for document production in general It should be noted that although the bulk of the discussion in this document concerning the constrained source lan guage and or language in g
64. sal Parser Architecture for Knowledge Based Machine Translation Technical Report Center for Machine Translation Carnegie Mellon University May 1987 Tomita ed et al and The Generalized LR Parser Compiler Version 8 1 User s Guide Technical Memo Center for Machine Translation Carnegie Mellon University April 1988 which are incorporated by refer ence 10 15 20 35 40 45 50 55 60 65 28 One of the advantages of interlingua translation systems over other types of MT systems is that the interlingua 260 is language independent that is the subject and target lan guages are never in direct contact This allows the construc tion of a machine translation system in which potentially any source and target languages could be selected while requir ing minimal modifications to the computational structure Clearly then any such system will need to be able to parse numerous source languages Hence a universal parser is needed which will take a language grammar as input rather than build the grammar into the interpreter proper This allows greater extensibility and generality In other words when dealing with multiple languages the linguistic structure is no longer a universal invariant that transfers across all applications as it was for pure English language parsers but rather is another dimension of param eterization and extensibility However semantic information can remain invariant across languages
65. slation Car negie Mellon University May 1990 which is incorporated by reference The MT analyzer 127 guided by analysis knowledge data files translates a CSL text 305 input sentence in the source language into a semantic frame representation of the meaning of the sentence The knowledge structures brought to bear in the analysis phase are the analysis grammars the mapping rules and the concept lexicon The first part of the analysis is the parsing process driven by the syntactic analysis of the input sentence The parser 910 uses the semantic restrictions embodied in the concept lexicon domain model to guide its treatment of syntactic ambiguities encountered in its analysis of the input The mapping rules mediate between the syntactic analysis gram mars and the concept lexicon The output of this analysis is syntactic f structures con taining all applicable semantic information This structure can be further processed by the second part of the MT analyzer 127 to produce a semantically organized frame representation in the form of the instantiation of the relevant concepts from the concept lexicon that were encountered in parsing the sentence The MT analyzer 127 arrives at this form by retrieving the f structure s semantic features these features contain all relevant semantic information The syntactic parser 910 used in the present invention is well known in the art and is described in detail in Tomita and Carbonell The Univer
66. st of possible alternative interpretations to the author allows the author to select the appropriate interpretation and then tags the sentence so as to indicate that authors selection C File Management System The File Management System FMS 110 serves as the authors interface to the IE Release Library 470 and the SGML text editor 140 Typically authors will select an IE to edit by indicating the file for that IE in the FMS interface The FMS 110 will then initiate and manage an SGML Editor session for that IE Finished documents will be forwarded to a human editor or Information Integrator via FMScontrolled facilities D Constrained Source Language CSL Given the complexity of today s technical documentation high quality machine translation of natural language uncon strained texts is practically impossible The major obstacles to this are of a linguistic nature The crucial process in translating a source text is that of rendering its meaning in the target language Because meaning lies under the surface of textual signals such overt signals have to be analyzed The meaning resulting from this analysis is used in the process of generating the signals of the target language Some of the most vexing translation problems result from those features inherent in language which hinder analysis and generation A few of these features are 1 Words with more than one meaning in an ambiguous context Example Make it with light ma
67. t point to that object are auto matically changed A shared object can be used in any publication type A shared information element is an information element that is used in more than one document For example the same four information elements in release library 470 are used to create portions of documents 480 and 485 All communication between the author and the LE 130 will be mediated by an LE User Interface UI implemented as either an extension of standard SGML Editor facilities such as menu options or in separate windows The UI provides and manages access to and control of the CSL checkers and CSL vocabulary look up and it is the primary tool enabling users to interact with the CSL LE Although the term user interface is often used in a more general sense to refer to the interface to an entire software system here the term will be restricted to mean the interface to the CSL checkers vocabulary look up facility and the disam biguation facility Among other things the UI must provide clear informa tion regarding a the actions the LE is taking b the result of these actions and c any ensuing actions For example whenever an action initiated through the UI introduces more than a very brief real time pause the UI should inform the author of a possible delay by means of a succinct message The author can invoke LE functionality by choosing an option from a pull down menu in text editor 140 The available
68. t in two ways First the output of the former is the input to the latter and second they share some external knowledge sources especially the domain model 137 The MT system 120 is subdivided as shown in FIG 9 Analysis consists of a Parser 910 and an Interpreter 920 The other half of the MT 120 can be divided into a Mapper 930 and a Generator 940 The oval circles in FIG 9 stand for the data that is produced and passed between the major software modules The DM 137 and specifically the MT DM 520 is used in three different ways during translation 1 the parser 910 uses the DM 137 to constrain possible attachments using strict subeategorization of arguments and modifiers during syntactic parsing 2 the interpreter 920 uses the DM 137 to instantiate the appropriate domain concepts during inter pretation 3 the mapper 930 uses the DM 137 to select the appropriate target realization for each interlingua concept The MT 120 runs as one or more server processes Each such MT process accepts translation requests from the FMS 5 995 920 27 110 and returns the results The requests contain SGML tagged CSL text and the results contain SGML tagged target language translations Since translations into more than one language may be going on at once the requests also include desired target language Since the MT server processes are specialized by target language a routing function is involved This routing function is performed autom
69. table or block of text is information that is referenced in the information element The content of shared objects are displayed in the author ing tool but only pointed to in the filed information element 450 Shared objects differ from information elements in that they do not stand alone i e they do not convey enough information by themselves to impart substantive information Each shared object is in itself a separate file as shown in block 450 Information elements are formed by combining unique blocks of information text and or tables with one or more shared objects Note that unique heading 415 and unique text 420 is combined with shared graphic 430 shared table 435 and shared text 425 A set of one or more information elements make up a complete document book 5 995 920 9 Shared objects stored in shared libraries Library types include shared graphic libraries 460a shared tables libraries 460b shared text libraries 460c shared audio libraries 460d and shared video libraries 460e A shared object is stored only one time When used in indi vidual information elements only pointers to the original shared object will be placed in the information shared file 450 This minimizes the amount of disk space that will be required When the original object is changed all those information elements tha
70. tasks by the generation lexicon and the generation structure mapping rules respec tively The output of this module is an f structure of the target language sentence that will be output by the system The goal of the generation module is to produce target language sentences from the interlingua text 260 frames produced by the CSL analyzer 127 There are three main steps in generation 1 Lexical Selection For each concept in the interlingua the most appropri ate lexical item must be selected 2 F Structure Creation A syntactic functional structure which determines the grammatical structure of the target utterance must be produced from the ILT frames 3 Syntactic Generation The syntactic functional structure is processed by the generation grammar to produce a target language sentence The design of the generation module 940 combines recent research in the area of lexical selection with a map and generate paradigm that has been utilized in previous trans lation systems For a more in depth discussion of machine translation and the specific design and operation of the modules described above see Nirenburg et al Machine Translation A Knowledg Based Approach Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc 1992 Sommers amp Hutchins Introduction to Machine Translation Academic Press London October 1991 Mita mura et al An Efficient Interlinzua Translation System for Multi lingual Document Production Proceedings of Machine Transla
71. tegory In the constrained language all syntactically ambiguous words should be used in constructions that disambiguate them One difficult problem arising from the special nature of the domain is in some fields the frequent use of lengthy compound nouns The modification relationships present in such compound nouns are expressed differently in different languages Since it is not always feasible to recover these relationships from the source text and express them in the target language complex compound nouns with the follow ing characteristics may be listed in the MT lexicon Technical terms from the user application specific vocabulary and Compound terms consisting of more than one word Complicated noun noun compounding should be avoided if possible However with some items listed in the lexicon the MT is capable of handling this important characteristic of documentation Note that noun noun compounding which is a very common feature of the English language may not necessarily be a common feature of other language and as such the constraints under which the constrained language is created differs which the particular source language being utilized English is very rich in verb particle combinations where a verb is combined with a preposition adverb or other part of speech As the particle can often be separated from the verb by objects or other phrases this causes complexity and ambiguity in MT processing of the input text
72. terial Is the material not dark not heavy 2 Words of ambiguous makeup Example The German word Arbeiterinformation is either Information for workers Arbeiter Information or formation of female workers Arbeiterin Formation 3 Words which play more than one syntactic role Round may be a noun a verb or an adjective A N Liston was knocked out in the first round V Round off the figures before tabulating them A Do not place the cube in a round box 5 995 920 11 4 Combinations of words which may play more than one syntactic role each Example British Left Waffles on Falklands If Left Waffles is read as N V the headline is about the British Left If Left Waffles is read as V N the headline is about the British 5 Combinations of words in ambiguous structures Example Visiting relatives can be boring Is it the visiting of relatives or the relatives who visit which can be boring Example Lift the head with the lifting eye Is the lifting eye an instrument or a feature of the head 6 Confusing pronominal reference Example The monkey ate the banana because it was What does it refer back to the monkey or the banana Generation problems add to the above increasing the overall difficulty of machine translation The magnitude of the translation problems is considerably lessened by any reductions of the range of linguistic phe
73. the combination of the preposition with and nouns having the semantic feature 4INSTRUMENT such combination form instru mental phrases This information enables the analyzer to determine that a since lever is 5 with the lever is INS b since remove can take the INS case the phrase with the lever attaches to fits together with and is inter preted as modifying remove Yet the DM 137 can only be as rich as we build it In those cases where the semantic information has not been devel oped as fully as possible the lexical entries in the domain 10 15 20 25 45 50 55 60 65 24 may not be able to support the disambiguation process performed by the MT analyzer 127 Consider the case of nail in Peter has removed the box with the nail If the DM 137 contains the information about nails being part of a wooden frame but fail to contain the information that nails are 43INSTRUMENT then the MT analyzer 137 cannot possibly determine whether with combines with nail to form an instrumental phrase The analyzer being unable to resolve the structural ambiguity the author will be asked to resolve it When the text submitted by the author undergoes grammar checking the following interaction occurs Author s Input When Checked Peter has removed the box with the nail grammar checker 620 Message The sentence is ambigu ous 1 Is the nail an ins
74. though of course not across domains Therefore it is crucial to keep semantic knowledge sources separate from syntactic ones so that if new linguistic information is added it will apply across all semantic domains and if new semantic information is added it will apply to all relevant languages The universal parser attempts to accomplish this factoring without making major concessions to either run time efficiency or semantic accu racy The parser 910 is characterized by three kinds of knowl edge sources One contains syntactic grammars for different languages another contains semantic knowledge bases for different domains and the third contains sets of rules which map syntactic forms words and phases into the semantic knowledge structure Each of the syntactic grammars is completely independent of any specific domain likewise each of the semantic knowledge basis is independent of any specific domain likewise each of the semantic knowledge basis is independent of any specific language Further the mapping rules are both language and domain dependent and a different set of mapping rules is created for each language domain combination Syntactic grammars domain knowledge bases and mapping rules are written in a highly abstract human readable manner This organization makes them easy to extend or modify but possibly machine inefficient for a run time parser The function of the mapping rule interpreter 920 is to generate and
75. tion Summit III Washington D C Jul 2 4 1991 Nirenburg S World Knowledge and Text Meaning in K Goodman and S Nirenburg eds The KBMT Project A Case Study in Knowledge Based Machine Translation San Mateo Calif Morgan Kaufmann KBMT 89 Project Report available from the Center for Machine Translation Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh Pa phone number 412 268 6591 4th Printing March 1990 S Nirenburg ed Machine Translation Theoretical and Methodological Issues Cambridge Cambridge University Press pgs 68 89 1987 and Carbonell et al Steps Toward Knowledge Based Machine Translation IEEE Transaction on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence Vol PAMI 3 No 4 July 1981 which are all hereby incorporated by reference While the invention has been particularly shown and described with reference to preferred embodiments thereof it will be understood by those skilled in the art that various changes in form and details may be made therein without departing from the spirit and scope of the invention What is claimed is 1 A computer based method for monolingual document development comprising the steps of 1 entering into a text editor input text in a source language 2 checking said input text against vocabulary source language constraints 3 providing to an author interactive feedback relating to said source input text if non constrained source lan guage is present in said source i
76. to Japanese and Japanese to English It operates with a knowledge based domain model which aids in interactive disambiguation 1 9 editing of the document to make it unambiguous However this interactive disam biguation is not typically done interactively with an author Once the system finds an ambiguous sentence that it cannot disambiguate it must stop the process and resolve ambigu ities by asking a author translator a series of multiple hoice questions In addition since the KBMT 89 does not utilize a well defined controlled input language the so called trans lator assisted interactive disambiguation produces text which requires post editing In view of the above it would be advantageous to have a translation system that eliminates both pre and post editing SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION The present invention is a system of integrated computer based processes for monolingual document development and multilingual translation An interactive computerized text editor enforces lexical and grammatical constraints on a natural language subset used by the authors to create their text and supports the authors in disambiguating their text to ensure its translatability The resulting translatable source language text undergoes machine translation into any one of a set of target languages without the translated text requir ing any post editing BRIEF DESCRWION OF THE DRAWINGS FIGS and 1 5 are high level block diagrams of the arch
77. to relations and attributes Relations will be defined as mappings among concepts e g belongs to is a relation since it maps an object into the set human organization while attributes will be defined as mappings of concepts into specially defined value sets e g temperature is an attribute that maps physical objects into values on the semi pen scale 0 with the granularity of degrees on the Kelvin scale Concepts are typically repre sented as frames whose slots are properties fully defined in the system Domain models are a necessary part of any knowledge based system not only a knowledge based machine trans lation one The domain model is a semantic hierarchy of concepts that occur in the translation domain For instance we may define the object O VEHICLE to include O WHEELED VEHICLE and O TRACKED VEHICLE and the former to include O TRUCK O WHEELED TRACTOR and so on At the bottom of this hierarchy are the specific concepts corresponding to terminology in CSL We call this bottom part the shared K DM In order to translate accurately we must place semantic restrictions on the roles that different concepts play For instance the fact that the agent role of an E DRIVE action must be filled by a human is a semantic restriction placed on O VEHICLE and automatically inherited by all types of vehicles thus saving repetitious work in hand coding each example The Authoring part of the domain model augments the
78. trument 2 Does the box have a nail Once the author makes an interpretation choice the checker attaches an invisible SGML tag to the sentence which indicates to the system how the sentence should be translated As mentioned above the MT analyzer 127 is called by the grammar checker in order to check whether input text or an IE or part thereof conforms to the grammatical and seman tic constraints of CSL In this regard a preferred embodi ment returns a strict green light red light message for each sentence the latter indicating that the author must correct the composition of the flagged sentences via the authoring environment Once the entire input text or IE has been certified as CSL compliant it may be stored away or sent for immediate translation Referring to FIG 8 a high level flow chart of the grammar checker 620 syntactical analysis and disambigu ation checker 630 semantic analysis is shown The word sentence is used below to refer to the unit of text that passes or fails the checking by the analysis module 127 The unit that is checked may actually be a non sentential text component such as a heading title or list element or a caption or other text from a graphic The grammar checker 620 recognizes sentence boundaries and SGML element boundaries in an SGML marked up text It identifies every sentence that does not conform to the CSL specification This will include every sentence which cannot
79. uch the general vocabulary will be relatively restricted for MT The technical nomenclature comprises technical content words and phrases and user application specific vocabulary Technical content items are words and phrases which are specific to a particular field of endeavor or domain Most technical words are nouns used to name items such as parts components machines or materials They may however also include other classes of words such as verbs adjectives and adverbs Obviously as these words are not used in common everyday conversation they contrast with general content words Technical content phrases are multiple word sequences built up from all the preceding classes These phrases are the most characteristic form of technical documentation vocabulary The user application specific vocabulary is the part of the terminology that contains distinctly user appli cation created words and complex terms These include the following product names titles of documents acronyms used by the user and from numbers The development of a useful and complete vocabulary is important for any documentation effort When documenta tion is subsequently translated the vocabulary becomes an important resource for the translation effort The MT 120 is designed to handle most functional items available in English except those referring to very personal I me my etc or gender based hers she etc or other pronominal it them etc u
80. vative A C programming language compiler and OSF Motif libraries are available The LE will be run within a Motif window manager It should be noted that the present invention is not limited to the above hardware and software platforms and other plat forms are contemplated by the present invention A Text Editor The preferred embodiment of the present invention pro vides a text editor 140 which allows the author to input information that will eventually be analyzed and finally translated into a foreign language Any commercially avail able word processing software can be used with the present invention A preferred embodiment uses a SGML text editor 140 provided by ArborText ArborText 535 West William St Ann Arbor Mich 48103 The SGML text editor 140 provides the basic word processing functionality required by authors and editors and is used with software by InterCap of Annapolis Md for creating graphics The present invention utilizes a SGML text editor 140 since it creates text using Standard Generalized Markup Language SGML tags SGML is an International Standard markup language for describing the structure of electronic documents It is designed to meet the requirements for a wide range of document processing and interchange tasks SGML tags enable documents to be described in terms of their content text images etc and logical structure chapters paragraphs figures tables etc In the case of larger more

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