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From: flanhart@diku.dk (Rene Andersen)
Subject: Re: Interlinguas
Message-ID: <flanhart.782918247@tyr.diku.dk>
Sender: flanhart@tyr.diku.dk
Date: Sun, 23 Oct 1994 13:17:27 GMT
References: <382qho$2n3@mango.aloha.com> <flanhart.782656272@tyr.diku.dk> <TED.94Oct22084841@ilios.crl.nmsu.edu>
Organization: Department of Computer Science, U of Copenhagen
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ted@crl.nmsu.edu (Ted Dunning) writes:


>In article <flanhart.782656272@tyr.diku.dk> flanhart@diku.dk (Rene Andersen) writes:

>   I may be pushed to admit, that an interlingua may be a theoretically
>   possibility -- though I am not sure about this.  But it seems pretty
>   obvious to me that it is not a PRACTICAL possibility.  Work on the
>   MT-system EUROTRA revealed that the people involved couldn't agree on
>   set of 50 features to be used in the system! How on earth should it
>   then be possible to agree on 10.000 basic concepts??

>EUROTRA didn't prove anything except that EC big science programs can
>be even more disastrous than US big science programs.  it certainly
>didn't say a thing about interlingual implementations.

I suggest you elaborate on your refusal. 

MY source of information is personal communication with a person
(cand. mag. Hanne Jensen) involved in EUROTRA at that time.  She very
clearly states the problems they had trying to define a set of
features to be used in the transfer-representation for EUROTRA.

Besides, there have been lots of off-springs from EUROTRA even though
the project itself didn't achieve its primary goal (useful MT between
the EEC-languages). As an example the danish PaTrans-system can be
mentioned, which is a commercially available system for translating
patents from English to Danish.

So if you would care to explain your position further, I am sure the
readers of this newsgroup would be very interested.  If not, I suggest
the readers to disregard the comments in the previous posting.

best

Ren'e Andersen


