Hindsight technique in machine translation of natural languages
Ida Rhodes, Franz L. Alt · Journal of Research of the National Bureau of Standards Section B Mathematics and Mathematical Physics · 1962
In the proposed system for automatic syntactic a nalysis of Russian sen tences developed at t he National Bureau of Standards, the computer splits each Russian word into stem and endin g and combines t he information obtain ed from these two elem ents into a morphological description of t he word, frequently co ntai ni ng several alternatives.The decision alllong snch alternatives is norma lly made on the basis of "predictions" arising from precedin g words of the same clause.There are, however, cases in which no prediction is available to account for a word, e.g., when t he object of a verb occurs before the ve rb itself.In such a case, instead of the usual prediction of the object, we need " hindsight."Also, it may happen that more than one of the morphological a lternatives of a wo rd agrees with predi ctio ns; or t hat a single morpholog ical alternative agrees with several pre dictions; or t hat only one of t helll agrces, yet there is a s uspicion that the agrecment is spurious: or that no >lgreement at all is found.It turns out that t he alternating use of pre diction and hindsight techniques ove rcomes most of these troubles.