Publications

The U.S. military must operate worldwide in a variety of international environments where many different languages are used. There is a critical need for translation, and there is a shortage of translators who can interpret military terminology specifically. One coalition environment where the need is particularly strong is in the Republic of Korea (RoK) where, although U.S. and RoK military personnel have been working together for many years, the language barrier still significantly reduces the speed and effectiveness of coalition command and control. This article describes the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Lincoln Laboratory's work on automated, two-way, English/Korean translation for enhanced coalition communications. Our ultimate goal is to enhance multilingual communications by producing accurate translations across a number of languages. Therefore, we have chosen an interlingua-based approach to machine translation that is readily adaptable to multiple languages. In this approach, a natural language understanding system transforms the input into an intermediate meaning representation called Semantic Frame, which serves as a basis for generating output in multiple languages. To produce useful and effective translation systems in the short term, we have focused on limited military task domains and have configured our system as a machine-assisted translation system. This allows the human translator to confirm or edit the machine translation.