Английский язык: Аннотирование и реферирование текста

267 "The Chronicles of Narnia" doesn't come near the poetic vision of "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy, and it doesn't have the dark under- currents that makes the "Harry Potter" series endlessly fascinating. This passage illustrates that machine translation, or MT, as it is known, remains one of the more challenged sub-disciplines of the blighted field of artificial intelligence. A proper name or a few well- crafted phrases suffice to throw the software off track. In the past few years, though, a new research approach has fueled a revival for machine translation: brute-force computing methods – which gauge the probabil- ity that a word or phrase in one language matches that in another – are at last bringing MT closer to human performance, in the estimation of developers of this software. Tougher Than Chess The ever increasing power of hardware and software algorithms today has propelled the computer past the chess grandmaster. (Recall that IBM's Deep Blue supercomputer triumphed over Garry Kasparov in 1997.) But on the whole, machine translation has experienced only halting progress in achieving humanlike capabilities in its more than 50-year history – and some critics would classify even that characteri- zation as overly generous. In 1954 IBM and Georgetown University demonstrated the trans- lation of more than 60 sentences from Russian into English. The IBM press release, dated January 8, 1954, glowed: "Russian was translated into English by an electronic 'brain' today for the first time." The mili- tary defense community and computer scientists expected routine ma- chine translation within five years, but it never materialized. In 1966 the U.S. government-sponsored Automatic Language Processing Advisory Committee reported that humans could perform faster, more accurate translation at half the cost. "There is no immedi- ate or predictable prospect of useful machine translation," its study concluded. Funding dried up, and only modest advances came in subsequent decades. In the late 1960s, the U.S. Air Force supplied support to a