Английский язык: Аннотирование и реферирование текста

271 12 new languages, including Russian, Arabic and Chinese. The text does not get edited afterward. "Some of it is admittedly pretty rough; other parts of it are quite good," notes Steve Richardson, a senior re- searcher in the natural-language processing unit. "The quality of the more statistical approaches is comparable to or beginning to exceed that of the rule-based systems that we used before." Getting the Gist All these techniques, however, raise the question of whether the machine-translation equivalent of a Deep Blue, the IBM chess com- puter, will ever beat humans at their own game. Can a machine provide more than mere "gisting," a rough idea of the contents of a foreign- language text? Kevin Hendzel, a spokesman for the American Transla- tors Association, says that the current optimism only promulgates dec- ades' worth of overhyped claims – FAHQT, the idea of "fully automatic high-quality translation," for instance. Gisting can help sort through massive amounts of foreign-language texts as long as it is understood to be inherently unreliable, he notes. Even a rough translation has its per- ils. He cites one Arabic-to-English translation that mentioned two sides "going at" each other, a fragment that caught the attention of security officials. The reference turned out to be for a soccer game, not a terror- ist attack or imminent battle. Keith Devlin, executive director of Stanford University's Center for the Study of Language and Information, remarks that machine-based systems will never equal the human linguist. "The use of statistical techniques, coupled with fast processors and large, fast memory, will certainly mean we will see better and better translation systems that work tolerably well in many situations," Devlin says, "but fluent trans- lation, as a human expert can do, is, in my view, not achievable." Knight, the pioneer in statistical translation, disagrees and points to the progress achieved during this decade. He foresees no limit to the technology, which will ultimately achieve human-level translations for everything except possibly poetry. He has shown blind examples of