A system-theoretical view of EBMT

摘要

According to the system theory of von Bertalanffy (1968), a "system" is an entity that can be distinguished from its environment and that consists of several parts. System theory investigates the role of the parts, their interaction and the relation of the whole with its environment. System theory of the second order examines how an observer relates to the system. This paper traces some of the recent discussion of example-based machine translation (EBMT) and compares a number of EBMT and statistical MT systems. It is found that translation examples are linguistic systems themselves that consist of words, phrases and other constituents. Two properties of Luhmann's (2002) system theory are discussed in this context: EBMT has focussed on the properties of structures suited for translation and the design of their reentry points, and SMT develops connectivity operators which select the most likely continuations of structures. While technically the SMT and EBMT approaches complement each other, the principal distinguishing characteristic results from different sets of values which SMT and EBMT followers prefer.