Apps & Design
Gregory R. Warnes
warnes at biostat.washington.edu
Sat Jul 1 09:07:18 PDT 2000
Careful. You are equating "the problem consists of independent pieces"
with parallelizable.
Stating that natural language processing is inherently non-parallel
ignores the fact that the only system known to correctly process natural
language (the brain) is made up of a lot of independent processing units!
The current tools may not correctly approach the problem correctly, but
that does not mean it isn't possible.
-Greg
On Sat, 1 Jul 2000, Alan Ward wrote:
AW>> Machine translation is a good example of a non-parallelizable
AW>> task. We (people) are not parallel machines, and don't think
AW>> that way. Instead, our speech is full of cross-references: from
AW>> one part of a sentence to another part, between sentences,
AW>> between paragraphs, plus all the external references (e.g. cultural)
AW>> you can think of. So to translate a text, you cannot break it up
AW>> into little bits, but must treat it as a whole.
AW>>
AW>> It is failing to understand this that makes most translation software
AW>> fail miserably.
AW>>
AW>> Best regards,
AW>> Alan Ward
AW>>
AW>>
AW>> > ----------
AW>> > De: Kragen Sitaker <kragen at pobox.com>
AW>> > A: beowulf at beowulf.org
AW>> > Asunto: Re: Apps & Design
AW>> > Fecha: divendres, 30 / juny / 2000 20:29
AW>>
AW>> > "Joel" asks:
AW>> > > 1. What kind of work has been done in applying Beowulf to machine
AW>> > > translation? Would parallelism help when trying to translate several
AW>> texts
AW>> > > into several different languages in the shortest possible time? Can
AW>> > > existing web-based translation systems (Systran, InterTran, &c) be
AW>> > > parallelised?
AW>>
AW>> > Unfortunately, I don't know anything about machine translation, so I
AW>> > can't answer the first question; but as for the second question,
AW>> > translating multiple documents is an obviously parallelizable task, as
AW>> > the results of the translations are independent. From looking at
AW>> > SYSTRAN output, it sort of looks like results of translations of
AW>> > invidual phrases in a document are pretty independent when they're
AW>> > further than a sentence or two apart.
AW>>
AW>>
AW>>
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AW>>
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