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The Multilingual Environment for Advanced Translations
Meat, the Multilingual Environment for Advanced Translations, is an
application for automatic translation of text in a variety of
languages. It has been developed at the Computing Research Laboratory
(CRL) at New Mexico State University (NMSU) in Las Cruces, New
Mexico. The first application involved Persian-English machine
translation for the Shiraz project at CRL. Currently, we are applying
Meat for translations from Persian, Korean, Japanese, Spanish,
Russian, Serbokroatian, and Turkish. The main design goals for Meat
were:
- Multilinguality. Meat is supposed to process a wide range of
languages. The least obstacle for doing this is the presence of a
multitude of scripts for writing text in different
languages. Consequently, Unicode is used to represent character data
throughout the system.
- Declarativity. It is highly advantageous to separate linguistic
information from the mechanisms which process it. We do this by using
a typed feature structure formalism to represent all kinds of
linguistic objects in the system.
- Integration. Representing data in an integrated way reduces interface
problems between different parts of a complex system. We represent
hypotheses as edges in a simplified layered chart.
- Modularity. Subtasks of linguistic processing are encapsulated in
components which are independent of each other.
- Configurability. In order to process several different languages
using a variety of tasks, the translation system must be highly
configurable. We use application definition files to compose
applications from individual components and to supply components with
necessary parameters.
History |
The initial version of Meat was implemented by Mike Freider and
Jan Amtrup in early 1999, based on Jan's dissertation. Since then, a number of persons have
contributed to the implementation. The people directly or indirectly
involved with Meat are: Jan W. Amtrup, Mike Freider, Denis Kamotsky,
Karine Megerdoomian, Mohamed Noamany, Remi Zajac.
Meat is © Jan W. Amtrup, 1995-2000,
© Computing Research Laboratory, 1999-2000, and
© The Regents of New Mexico State University, 1999-2000
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