UNITRAN: An Interlingual Machine Translation System

Abstract

This report describes the UNITRAN (UNIversal TRANslator) system, an implementation of a principle-based approach to natural language translation. The system is "interlingual", i.e., the model is based on universal principles that hold across all languages; the distinctions among languages are handled by settings of parameters associated with the universal principles. Interaction effects of linguistic principles are handled by the syste so that the programmer does not need to specifically spell out the details of rule applications. Only a small set of principles covers all languages; thus, the unmanageable grammar size of alternative approaches is no longer a problem.