Research

History

We supported research at the University of Washington’s Turing Center from 2005 through 2009. The supported research produced and evaluated systems for panlingual communication.

Topics

Research we have supported or conducted has addressed these questions:

• Are there translingual communication and information objectives that can be achieved with translated dictionary words alone (Etzioni 2007; Colowick 2008b; Soderland 2009; Everitt 2010)?
• Can people who don’t share a language play games together and improve translation engines as a byproduct?
• Given a massive network of lexemes and meanings, what algorithms make the best choices among translation alternatives, and how can they be executed fast enough for practical use (Mausam 2009, Mausam 2010)?
• What methods of disambiguation by authors work best (Sammer 2006; Pool 2007a; Pool 2007b)?
• How can the universalities of language be leveraged to facilitate the creation of computer models of grammars for all the world’s languages (Bender 2005)?
• Can controlled languages permit authors to create translatably precise documents and permit monolinguals to act as translators (Pool 2006; Pool 2010a; Wyner 2010)?

As we began our work, we conducted reviews of current knowledge on topics of interest to us. This work resulted in technical reports on discourse statistics (Colowick 2007a), graphical meaning representations (Colowick 2007b), textual meaning representations (Colowick 2007c), and multilingual interaction systems (Colowick 2008a).

Results

The Turing Center used our support to develop and test a new intelligent-inference-based technology of panlingual translation and communication (Pool 2010b, Sammer 2007), relying on a multilingual lexical database, TransGraph, powered by SQL Server. The Turing Center demonstrated this technology in PanImages (Colowick 2008b, Etzioni 2007), no longer operational, and Panlingual Translator. Underlying these demos is an enhanced version of TransGraph, PanDictionary, that uses redundant translation paths to discover the most probable translations (Mausam 2010). These results led the foundation to a new focus on resource development and the PanLex project.

References

Timothy Baldwin, Jonathan Pool, and Susan M. Colowick, “PanLex and LEXTRACT: Translating all Words of all Languages of the World”, 2010.

Emily M. Bender and Dan Flickinger, “Rapid Prototyping of Scalable Grammars: Towards Modularity in Extensions to a Language-Independent Core”, 2005.

Janara Christensen, Mausam, and Oren Etzioni, “A Rose is a Roos is a Ruusu: Querying Translations for Web Image Search”, 2009.

Susan Colowick, “Distribution of Some Linguistic Features in Some Types of Discourse”, 2007a.

Susan Colowick, “Graphical Representation of Meaning”, 2007b.

Susan Colowick, “Textual Representation of Meaning”, 2007c.

Susan Colowick, “Systems for Multilingual Interaction”, 2008a.

Susan Colowick, “Multilingual Search with PanImages”, 2008b.

Oren Etzioni, Kobi Reiter, Stephen Soderland, and Marcus Sammer, “Lexical Translation with Application to Image Search on the Web”, 2007.

Katherine Everitt, Christopher Lim, Oren Etzioni, Jonathan Pool, and Stephen Soderland, “Evaluating Lemmatic Communication”, 2010.

Christopher Lim, “Panlingual Translator”, 2009.

Mausam, Stephen Soderland, Oren Etzioni, Daniel S. Weld, Michael Skinner, and Jeff Bilmes, “Compiling a Massive, Multilingual Dictionary via Probabilistic Inference”, 2009.

Mausam, Stephen Soderland, Oren Etzioni, Daniel S. Weld, Kobi Reiter, Michael Skinner, and Jeff Bilmes, “Panlingual Lexical Translation via Probabilistic Inference”, 2010.

Jonathan Pool, “Can Controlled Languages Scale to the Web?”, 2006.

Jonathan Pool and Susan Colowick, “Disambiguating for the Web: A Test of Two Methods”, 2007a.

Jonathan Pool and Susan Colowick, “Syntactic Disambiguation for the Semantic Web”, 2007b.

Jonathan Pool, “Translators in a Global Community”, 2010a.

Jonathan Pool, “Panlingual Globalization”, 2010b.

Marcus Sammer, Kobi Reiter, Stephen Soderland, Katrin Kirchhoff, and Oren Etzioni, “Ambiguity Reduction for Machine Translation: Human-Computer Collaboration”, 2006.

Marcus Sammer and Stephen Soderland, “Building a Sense-Distinguished Multilingual Lexicon from Monolingual Corpora and Bilingual Lexicons”, 2007.

Stephen Soderland, Christopher Lim, Mausam, Bo Qin, Oren Etzioni, and Jonathan Pool, “Lemmatic Machine Translation”, 2009.

Adam Wyner, Krasimir Angelov, Guntis Barzdins, Danica Damljanovic, Brian Davis, Norbert Fuchs, Stefan Hoefler, Ken Jones, Kaarel Kaljurand, Tobias Kuhn, Martin Luts, Jonathan Pool, Mike Rosner, Rolf Schwitter, and John Sowa, “On Controlled Natural Languages: Properties and Prospects”, Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, 5972 (2010), 281–289.