Joseph Olive, Caitlin Christianson, John McCary (eds.): Handbook of Natural Language Processing and Machine Translation

摘要

The Handbook of Natural Language Processing and Machine Translation is a 936 pages long, two-and-half-kilo hardcover heavyweight outlining the objectives, results and achievements of the GALE program (Global Autonomous Language Exploitation) funded by DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency). It is the public final account on the work by three GALE teams on clearly defined language processing challenges, stemming from the practical objective of providing end-users with accurate and timely information, relevant to the fulfilment of their duties. In the DARPA context, the end-users are mainly English-speaking military staff or intelligence analysts. The GALE task framework is strikingly simple: transcribe-translate-distil-present. The first task is to collect large amounts of training and evaluation material: text and speech in Arabic and Chinese from pre-defined source types (web, newswire, broadcast news and discussions). The next task is content translation and extraction of relevant facts which are then presented to the end-user in clear and concise English.