ULTRA is a

machine translation Machine translation is use of computational techniques to translate text or speech from one language to another, including the contextual, idiomatic and pragmatic nuances of both languages. Early approaches were mostly rule-based or statisti ...

system created for five languages (Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, English, and German) in the Computing Research Laboratory in 1991. ULTRA (Universal Language Translator), is a machine translation system developed at the Computing Research Laboratory, which can translate between five languages (Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, English and German). It uses

Artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is the capability of computer, computational systems to perform tasks typically associated with human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning, problem-solving, perception, and decision-making. It is a field of re ...

as well as linguistic and

logic programming Logic programming is a programming, database and knowledge representation paradigm based on formal logic. A logic program is a set of sentences in logical form, representing knowledge about some problem domain. Computation is performed by applyin ...

methods. The main goal of the system is to be robust, to cover general language and to be simple to use. It uses bidirectional

parsers Parsing, syntax analysis, or syntactic analysis is a process of analyzing a string of symbols, either in natural language, computer languages or data structures, conforming to the rules of a formal grammar by breaking it into parts. The term ''par ...

/generators. The system has a language-independent system of intermediate representation, which means that it takes into account needs for expression (expression is one of the main elements of language) and it uses relaxation techniques to provide the best translation. It used an

X Window The X Window System (X11, or simply X) is a windowing system for bitmap displays, common on Unix-like operating systems. X originated as part of Project Athena at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1984. The X protocol has been a ...

user interface.

ULTRA's databases

* ULTRA has vocabularies based on about 10,000 word senses in each of its five languages. * It represents expressions. * It has an access to many dictionary databases.

Operation

Users paste a sentence into the "source" window. They chose a target language and press Translate. The tool translates the source text, taking into consideration what is said, how it is said and why it is said.

Lexical Lexical may refer to: Linguistics * Lexical corpus or lexis, a complete set of all words in a language * Lexical item, a basic unit of lexicographical classification * Lexicon, the vocabulary of a person, language, or branch of knowledge * Lexical ...

entries in the system have two parts: * Specific language entry corresponding to the graphic form, which is representing some kind of information/sense and * Intermediate representation giving proper forms that represent the sense of the expression. ULTRA works with

Intermediate representation An intermediate representation (IR) is the data structure or code used internally by a compiler or virtual machine to represent source code. An IR is designed to be conducive to further processing, such as optimization and translation. A "good" ...

of the language between the systems, so no transfer takes place. Each language has its own systems, which are independent. Having the independent systems gives an extra benefit. Adding another language does not disrupt existing language translations.

Intermediate representation

Developers David Farwell and Yorick Wilks created IR (interlingual representation). It was a base for analyzing and generating expressions. They analyzed many different types of communications (business letters, documents, emails) to compare the communication style. ULTRA looks for the best words for some kinds of information and good forms and equivalents for some expression in target language.

References

{{reflist

External

*Austermuhl Frank, ″Electronic tools for translations″, Manchester 2001 *Wilks Yorick, ″Machine Translation. Its Scope and Limits.″, Springer Science+Business Media LLC 2009 *Farwell David, Wilks Yorick, "ULTRA: A multilingual machine translator", Washington 1991 Computational linguistics