The goal of the Expedition Project
is to
develop the environment to enable quick ramp-up of a machine
translation (MT) system from any "low-density" language (one
lacking significant machine tractable resources) into English.
The system guides language informants - who need not be linguistic
experts - through knowledge elicitation modules targeting the
ecology, morphology, syntax, and lexical stock of their
language. Once informants provide all the required source-language
information, they press a button and an MT system is automatically
built, with no further input from developers. That is, all the
necessary English language information, transfer rules, etc., are
resident in the system upon delivery to the informant.
Apart from providing a template for building MT systems,
Expedition seeks to create new algorithms permitting the
partial automation of knowledge acquisition, facilitate the
importation of available on-line resources (lexicons, morphological
analyzers, etc.), and develop MT prototypes for a number of natural languages,
including Turkish.
