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Article 2386 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder)
Subject: Re: Machine Translation (was re: Searle's response to silicon brain?)
Message-ID: <1991Dec23.175207.37941@spss.com>
Date: Mon, 23 Dec 1991 17:52:07 GMT
References: <1991Dec18.172040.3506@spss.com> <45303@mimsy.umd.edu> <1991Dec21.000014.6836@husc3.harvard.edu>
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In article <1991Dec21.000014.6836@husc3.harvard.edu> zeleny@zariski.harvard.edu 
(Mikhail Zeleny) writes (quoting Robert Kohout):
>>       [...]              if someone in this debate sees how
>>the correctness of Searle's position in any way implies that,
>>for example, we will never be able to engineer a fully automatic,
>>high quality machine translator I wish they'd explain it
>
>Simple.  Correct translation is a matter of finding an approximate synonym;
>synonymy is a semantic relation; if machines can't compute semantic
>relations, they can't translate anything.

Kind of an amazing conclusion to come to in light of the fact that commercial
machine translation programs are available today.  They are not very good
translators (according to a friend who's used one), but they still belie
Mr. Zeleny's absolute conclusion that machines "can't translate anything."

When one's conclusion is wrong, one looks for the incorrect premise-- in
this case, that synonymy is a semantic relation.  For humans no doubt it is,
but for machines a table of synonyms and usage rules will do.
The machine may translate in a way that bears absolutely no relation to
the way humans do.  But so what?  Mr. Kohout was asking for a machine
translator, not a robotic mind.  


