Briefly Noted

This is a slightly enhanced second edition of the 1983 report 84/2 of the Centre for Computational Linguistics at UMIST in Manchester, England. As Harold Somers states in the preface to this edition, "it was the first attempt anyone had made to take a critical and objective look at the details of MT systems." This explains to a large extent the interest it may arouse and justifies to some extent its (re)publication within the Studies in Computational Linguistics series a decade after its original completion. The book comprises two parts. Part I is a concise general discussion about machine translation (MT). It covers succinctly the linguistic and computational information necessary to be able to follow the second part of the book. Part II surveys, in great detail, and evaluates six MT systems: SYSTRAN, TAUM-M6t6o, TAUM Aviation, GETA Ariane-78, Yorick Wilks's Preferential Semantics (PS) system, and METAL. Neither of the authors were involved in the development of any of these software projects. They did, however, have an in-depth understanding of the intricacies of the systems, having collected numerous relevant reports and intemal memos. Their description is given in a relatively clear, easy-to-follow manner without compromising on technical detail. Harold Somers has provided a number of additional footnotes trying to put (part of) the discussion into a mid-90's perspective. The book is not, nor does it claim to be, either an introduction to MT or a general reference book on MT. In essence, it is a critical, detailed description of the six aforementioned MT systems. Somers claims in the preface that "this effort has not yet been duplicated." As humble as he may be, the facts are that by the time he wrote this preface (December 1993) Somers himself had already coauthored Hutchins and Somers (1992). The latter is a widely available introductory MT textbook and reference book that contains, inter alia, four full chapters dedicated to critical detailed descriptions of most of these MT systems (all excepting TAUM Aviation and Wilks's PS system). Although Hutchins and Somers may seem at times to exhibit more of a socio-historical interest than a technical one-in contrast to the book under review-nonetheless, they too go into substantial technical detail and give overall comparable descriptions. The effort, thus, has actually been duplicated to a significant extent, casting certain doubt on any serious need for this second (partially redundant) edition of Whitelock and Kilby's book. To summarize, the book is interesting, well written, not too thick, and easily read. However, unless one is explicitly interested in detailed critical descriptions of TAUM Aviation or Wilks's PS system, then Hutchins and Somers (1992)--which covers most of that discussed by Whitelock and Kilby and much much more--should probably suffice. This renders the book under review somewhat dispensable.--Daniel RadzinskL Lexical Technology Inc., Alameda, California.