Preliminary report on the insertion of English articles in Russian-English MT output

Research on a non-statistical scheme for the insertion of English articles in machine-translated Russian is described. Ideal article insertion as a goal is challenged as unreasonable. Classification of English nouns, simple syntactic criteria, and multiple printout are the scheme's main features. One of the most discussed problems in the automatic translation of Russian documents into English is the insertion of English articles in the output. Approaches to the solution of this problem, where it has been considered at all, are as varied as the basic MT programs in use by the different teams engaged in this work. Most projects, however, either use statistical criteria in the determination of English articles to the exclusion of all other considerations, or use a combined syntactico-statistical method; the aim of all such routines is the selection of one and only one of the four articles (a, an, the, Ø). None of the solutions presented to date in the literature is entirely satisfactory. Two kinds of ambiguity present themselves as obstacles to the successful determination of English articles in automatically translated Russian. The first derives from the structure of the Russian language, in that it does not employ any simple elements isomorphic with English articles as adjuncts to nominal phrases—there are no elements in Russian text which may be correlated strongly with the English articles. This kind of ambiguity is not always formally resolvable since it often raises the particular question: "What did the author mean in this instance?" In such instances, even with his immense reservoir of repertorial and contextual clues, the human translator can only make an educated guess, and the machine, with its drastically limited set of potential determiners, cannot do better. Rut another kind of ambiguity arises from the side of the English output itself. Situations are frequently encountered in which various articles may be inserted without doing violence to the text, and occasionally without altering in any simply statable way the intuitive meaning of the passage. In: "He is working on —— analysis of English verbs." we may read an, the, or Ø, with appropriate intonations, and get reasonable Eng-lish sentences which differ in meaning, if at all in any systematic way, very slightly indeed. The question: "What is the preferred English article?" in these situations is not easily answered, and it does not seem a reasonable hope to look for a single arbitrary choice which will work in every …