The idea of a universal Interlingua as a basis for defining all the
concepts of all languages and facilitating translations among them
is one of the oldest and fondest hopes for machine translation. (01)
One of the largest and best funded projects (billions of yen from the
Japanese government in the period 1986 to 1994) is EDR. Following is
a 4-page summary of their goals, formats, and achievements: (02)
http://www.aclweb.org/anthology-new/C/C96/C96-2195.pdf (03)
Following is an excerpt from that article:
> The Concept Dictionary contains information on the 400,000 concepts listed
> in the Word Dictionary and is divided according to information type into
> the Headconcept Dictionary, the Concept Classification Dictionary, and the
> Concept Description Dictionary. The Headconcept Dictionary describes
>information
> on the concepts themselves. The Concept Classification Dictionary describes
> the super/sub relations among the 400,000 concepts. The Concept Description
> Dictionary describes the semantic (binary) relations, such as 'agent',
> 'implement', and 'place', between concepts that co-occur in a sentence. (04)
Table 1 in that article summarizes the users. Among them, it lists 66
Japanese universities and one university "overseas". I suspect that
the overseas university is Stanford (CSLI). I had talked with some
people at CSLI about EDR. They said that they had a copy, but nobody
had found anything useful to do with it. (05)
Following is another article about EDR from a conference in 1997: (06)
http://mt-archive.info/AMTA-1997-Miyoshi.pdf (07)
That article is from a workshop on Interlinguas. For the table of
contents of the proceedings with URLs to the papers presented, see (08)
http://mt-archive.info/AMTA-1997-TOC.htm (09)
The series of conferences on Interlinguas continued, but the
proceedings from later years were published in book form, and
they're not available for free download. (010)
As far as I know, the R & D on Interlinguas has not produced any great
breakthroughs in natural language understanding or high-quality machine
translation. If anybody knows of even minor breakthroughs (successful
commercial applications), please send a note to Ontolog Forum. (011)
John (012)
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