THE POSSIBLE USE OF DECISION PROCEDURES IN MECHANICAL TRANSLATION by K. Spärck Jones

In his report on the work of the M.I.T. group, and again in Appendices II and III, Professor Bar-Hillel refers to the use of decision procedures in Mechanical Translation (M.T.), procedures which analyse the structure of given sections of text in order to test them for "sentencehood"*. Appendix III contains his most recent views of the question: BarHillel has originally asserted (Ref. "A quasi-arithmetical notation for syntactic description".) that a method of analysis based on the "Immediate Constituent Model" of sentence structure, that is, a method which regards a sentence as composed of "contiguous segments" only, would be sufficient to determine the syntactic character of any sentence which can occur. He now doubts whether, even supplemented by transformational operations(1) which take account of "noncontiguous" but "syntactically associated" elements, such a procedure would succeed in resolving and correctly describing all the sentence patterns of a language.