The machine translation system SYSTRAN was assessed for translation quality and system productivity. The test was carried out on translations from English to French dealing with food science and technology. Machine translations were compared to manual translations of the same texts. SYSTRAN was found to be a useful system of information…

The paper surveys the major projects on the understanding of natural language that fall within what may now be called the artificial intelligence paradigm of natural language systems. Some space is devoted to arguing that the paradigm is now a reality and different in significant respects from the generative paradigm of present-day linguistics.…

An approach to using the computer to assemble German tests is described. The purposes of the system would be: (1) an expansion of the bilingual lexical memory bank to list and store idioms of all degrees of difficulty, with frequency data and with complete and sophisticated retrieval possibility for assembly; (2) the creation of an…

This word frequency list was extracted from a corpus of fifty half-hour conversations recorded in Paris during the academic year 1967-68. The speakers, who did not know that they were being recorded, were all well-educated professionals and all speakers of the most standard dialect of French. The list is made up of all phonetically discrete words…

A set of procedures for testing hypotheses about the syntactic structure of natural languages has been developed for use on-line with computer display consoles. The procedures were designed in the context of Chomsky's transformational generative grammar. A linguist can construct phrase structure trees, selecting with the lightgun from alternative…

The inventory presented here was produced by listing 13 sentence elements (subject, object, etc.) with specifications as to mutual exclusiveness and then presenting them to a computer with a request for permutations. Those items for which no examples could be found were excluded from the output, and the remaining patterns constitute the inventory…

The final report on a project to develop a standard corpus of present-day Mandarin Chinese is presented. This corpus consists of words of running text of Chinese prose printed in the Republic of China during the calendar year 1968. The corpus, although originally planned to have a total of 500 samples of 2000 words each, has only 294 samples. Each…

This regression system is an intermediate result of a project to develop a comprehensive regression computer system as a foundation for a complete statistical man-machine interface. The outstanding features of the system can be condensed into two principal concepts. First, the program dynamically allocates core resulting in no limits on title…

A computer-assisted instruction system, called IT1 (Interpretive Tutor), is described which is intended to assist a student's efforts to learn the content of textual material and to evaluate his efforts toward that goal. The text is represented internally in the form of semantic networks with auxiliary structures which relate network nodes to…

This paper is the second step in the preparation of forecasts of occupational and industrial information which will meet the needs of the Information System for Vocational Decisions (ISVD). The author discusses the computation routines which need to be developed, tested and operationalized toward the goal of combining occupational and industrial…

The first section of this paper deals with the attempts within the framework of transformational grammar to make semantics a systematic part of linguistic description, and outlines the characteristics of the generative semantics position. The second section takes a critical look at generative semantics in its later manifestations, and makes a case…

The relationship between the disciplines of linguistics and information science has not yet been studied in depth. We must assess the state of our knowledge of natural language and determine how this knowledge is applicable within the context of an information system. The concept of a natural language information system can be specified in terms…

This report summarizes a research program in modeling human communication ability. The methodology involved selecting a single, naturally occurring dialogue, instructing a human observer to extract certain aspects relative to its comprehension, and then using these aspects to guide the construction and verification of the model. The model assumes…

This report is part of ongoing research engaged in transforming knowledge of how human communication works into improvements in man-machine communication of existing and planned computer systems. The methodology includes having a trained "Observer" annotate transcripts of human communication in a prescribed manner. One of the issues,…

The first section of this course on programming introduces LISP as a programming language designed to do symbol manipulation, with consequent prevalence in auto-instructional (AI) work. A programming language specifies in its description a number of primitive operations which the computer knows how to perform. An algorithm is the set of…