Once upon a Time in 1954…
Posted: October 28th, 2015 | Author: Domingo | Filed under: Artificial Intelligence | Tags: Baroni, Bernardi, Chomsky, Erik T. Mueller, Georgetown-IBM experiment, IBM Watson, natural language processing, NLP, Zamparelli | Comments Off on Once upon a Time in 1954…
Die Grenzen meiner Sprache bedeuten die Grenzen meiner Welt
(The limits of my language are the limits of my world)
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
… In a cold day of January it took place in Washington DC the Georgetown-IBM experiment, the first and most influential demonstration of automatic translation performed throughout the history. Developed jointly by the University of Georgetown and IBM, the experiment implied the automatic translation of more than 60 sentences from Russian into English. The sentences were chosen precisely; there was no syntactic analysis, which could manage to identify the sentence structure. The approach was mainly lexicographic, based on dictionaries in which a certain word had a link to some particular rules.
That episode was a success. Story has it that the level of euphoria amongst the researchers was such that it was stated that within three or five years the problem of the automatic translation would be solved… That was more than 60 years ago and the language problem –the comprehension and generation of messages by the machine- is still pending. Probably this is the last frontier which separates the human intelligence from the artificial intelligence.