94:. It evolved into a 16-inch plastic disk with data recorded as a series of microscopic black rectangles or clear spots. Only the outermost 4 inches of the disk were used for storage, which increased the linear speed of the portion being accessed. When the disk spun at 2,400 RPM it had an access speed of about 1 Mbit/sec. In total, the system stored 30 Mbits, making it the highest density online system of its era.
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of the human in achieving a probability of .50 in anticipating the words in a sentence is largely due to his experience and the real meanings of the words already discovered." In other words, simply translating the words alone would allow a human to effectively read a document, because they would be able to reason out the proper meaning from the context provided by earlier words.
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II, which King referred to as "dictionary stuffing". Stuffing was an attempt to deal with the problems of ambiguous words by "stuffing" prefixes onto them from earlier words in the text. These modified words would match with similarly stuffed words in the dictionary, reducing the number of false positives.
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King advocated a simple word-for-word approach to translations. He thought that the natural redundancies in language would allow even a poor translation to be understood, and that local context was alone enough to provide reasonable guesses when faced with ambiguous terms. He stated that "the success
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issues, human translation was relatively inexpensive – about $ 6 per 1,000 words. Worse, the FTD was slower as well; tests using physics papers as input demonstrated that the translator was "10 percent less accurate, 21 percent slower, and had a comprehension level 29 percent lower than when he used
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At the time, most researchers in the nascent machine translation field felt that the major challenge to providing reasonable translations was building a large library, as storage devices of the era were both too small and too slow to be useful in this role. King felt that the photoscopic store was a
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In 1960 the
Washington team also joined IBM, bringing their dictionary efforts with them. The dictionary continued to expand as additional storage was made available, reaching 170,000 words and terms by the time it was installed at the FTD. A major software update was also incorporated in the Mark
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using custom
Cyrillic terminals, and then input into the machine for translation. The results were less than impressive, but were enough to suggest that a larger and faster machine would be a reasonable development. In the meantime, the Mark I was applied to translations of the Soviet newspaper,
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Assuming there was a shortage of qualified translators, the FTD became extremely interested in King's efforts at IBM. Funding for an upgraded machine was soon forthcoming, and work began on a "Mark II" system based around a transistorized computer with a faster and higher-capacity 10 inch
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The ALPAC report was as influential as the
Georgetown experiment had been a decade earlier; in the immediate aftermath of its publication, the US government suspended almost all funding for machine translation research. Ongoing work at IBM and Itek had ended by 1966, leaving the field to the
83:(ITC) of Los Angeles. This was not for a translation system, but a pure research and development contract for a high-performance photographic online storage medium consisting of small black rectangles embedded in a plastic disk. When the initial contract ran out, what was then the
132:, and continued development of the photostore-based translator. Over time, King changed the approach from a pure word-for-word translator to one that stored "stems and endings", which broke words into parts that could be combined back together to form complete words again.
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natural solution to the problem, and pitched the idea of an automated translation system based on the photostore to the Air Force. RADC proved interested, and provided a research grant in May 1956. At the time, the Air Force also provided a grant to researchers at the
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to improve performance, and an average speed of 20 words per minute was claimed. The results of the carefully selected input text was quite impressive. After its return to the FTD, it was used continually until 1970, when it was replaced by a machine running
58:), as it was known to the Air Force, was primarily used to convert Soviet technical documents for distribution to western scientists. The translator was installed in 1959, dramatically upgraded in 1964, and was eventually replaced by a
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261:, was highly critical of the existing efforts, demonstrating that the systems were no faster than human translations, while also demonstrating that the supposed lack of translators was in fact a surplus, and as a result of
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These numbers for the early disk systems appear to be inaccurate – another document from the same author suggests that these figures are actually for the later version used on the Mark II translator.
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was caught flat-footed and then proved to repeatedly fail in spectacular fashion. This embarrassing turn of events led to a huge investment in US science and technology, including the formation of
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that stored 170,000 word-for-word and statement-for-statement translations and a custom computer to look them up at high speed. Built for the US Air Force's
Foreign Technology Division, the
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The first machine, "Mark I", was demonstrated in July 1959 and consisted of a 65,000 word dictionary and a custom tube-based computer to do the lookups. Texts were hand-copied onto
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provided by the third party, which they hoped would eliminate the time-consuming process of copying the
Russian text into machine-readable cards.
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226:. The version at the Fair included a 150,000 word dictionary, with about 1/3 of the words in phrases. About 3,500 of these were stored in
251:(NAS) to prepare a report on the state of machine translation. The NAS formed the "Automatic Language Processing Advisory Committee", or
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technical and scientific journals so researchers in the "west" could keep up to date on developments behind the
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and a variety of intelligence efforts that would attempt to avoid being surprised in this fashion again.
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The system was developed by
Gilbert King, chief of engineering at ITC, along with a team that included
325:"The first public demonstration of machine translation: the Georgetown-IBM system, 7th January 1954"
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that the system was "...found, in an operational evaluation, to be quite useful by the
Government."
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G. W. King, G. W. Brown and L. N. Ridenour, "Photographic
Techniques for Information Storage",
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who were working on the problem of producing an optimal translation dictionary for the project.
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In 1954 IBM gave an influential demonstration of machine translation, known today as the "
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and other organizations. FTD was tasked with the translation of Soviet and other
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glass-based optical disc spinning at 2,400 RPM. Another addition was an
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Europeans, who continued development of systems like SYSTRAN and Logos.
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The translator began in a June 1953 contract from the US Navy to the
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450:"Language and Machines: Computers in Translation and Linguistics"
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Language and
Machines: Computers in Translation and Linguistics
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439:"A Table Look-up Machine for Processing of Natural Languages"
427:, Volume 41 Issue 10 (October 1953), pp. 1421–1428
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G. W. King, "Stochastic
Methods of Mechanical Translation",
480:"A History of Online Information Services, 1963–1976"
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as the Foreign Technology Division (FTD, now known as the
257:, and published their findings in 1966. The report,
87:(RADC) took up further funding in 1954 and onwards.
501:List of military electronics of the United States
434:, Volume 3 Issue 2 (1956) pp. 38–39
461:"Gilbert W. King and the IBM-USAF Translator"
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245:United States Department of Defense
81:International Telemeter Corporation
465:Early Years in Machine Translation
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130:Thomas J. Watson Research Center
247:commissioned the United States
185:Wright-Patterson Air Force Base
401:"ALPAC: the (in)famous report"
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32:Automatic Language Translator
18:Automatic Language Translator
516:Machine translation software
249:National Academy of Sciences
128:In 1958 King moved to IBM's
85:Rome Air Development Center
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224:1964 New York World's Fair
218:In 1962 King left IBM for
454:National Research Council
104:Georgetown–IBM experiment
209:optical character reader
119:University of Washington
467:, Joh Benjamins, 2000,
432:Mechanical Translation
425:Proceedings of the IRE
406:6 October 2007 at the
160:On 4 October 1957 the
38:system that converted
459:John Hutchins (ed),
330:3 March 2016 at the
266:human translation."
482:, MIT Press, 2003,
149:Scientific American
36:machine translation
475:(RADC-TDR-62-105)
381:Hutchins, pg. 175
372:Hutchins, pg. 174
351:Hutchins, pg. 172
314:Hutchins, pg. 171
263:supply and demand
75:Photoscopic store
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510:Categories
363:King, 1956
294:References
299:Citations
166:Sputnik 1
164:launched
111:mainframe
66:in 1970.
60:mainframe
52:AN/GSQ-16
495:See Also
404:Archived
328:Archived
62:running
233:SYSTRAN
156:Mark II
108:IBM 704
70:History
64:SYSTRAN
44:English
40:Russian
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143:Pravda
98:Mark I
34:was a
274:Notes
254:ALPAC
174:DARPA
484:ISBN
469:ISBN
220:Itek
178:NASA
162:USSR
56:XW-2
54:(or
193:DIA
30:'s
28:IBM
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20:)
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