Prof. Christian Boitet

Towards a computer-automated translation (CAT) system capable of ensuring high-quality communication between the hundreds of “languages of the Web”

We begin with a brief history, starting from the beginnings with B. Vauquois in 1961, the process moving from classical "analysis" to "heuristic transduction". The experimentation of various approaches (linguistic and computational) led in the 1980s to the idea of a new domain, "lingware engineering", with a semi-formal specification language of string-tree correspondences, and the emergence of the "CxAxQ thesis": one cannot have coverage, automaticity and quality at 100%, but one can have 2 of the 3 at 100% if one compromises on the 3rd.  The problem we face is new: it is about how to handle "all pairs of languages", for almost 320 languages (those already "active on the Web"), of which more than 200 are not yet handled by MT, arriving at a communication of very high quality, or even "with guaranteed meaning". We propose an implementable approach, with very few linguists-contributors, and with speakers-users contributing by translating or post-editing into their language.