Abstract: We are exploring the historical significance of research in the field of machine translation conducted by Bulcsu Laszlo, Croatian linguist, who was a pioneer in machine translation in Yugoslavia during the 1950s. We are focused on two important seminal papers written by members of his research group from 1959 and 1962, as well as their legacy in establishing a Croatian machine translation program based around the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences of the University of Zagreb in the late 1950s and early 1960s. We are exploring their work in connection with the beginnings of machine translation in the USA and USSR, motivated by the Cold War and the intelligence needs of the period. We also present the approach to machine translation advocated by the Croatian group in Yugoslavia, which is different from the usual logical approaches of the period, and his advocacy of cybernetic methods, which would be adopted as a canon by the mainstream AI community only decades later.

Introduction: In this paper, we are exploring the historical significance of Croatian machine translation research group. The group was active in 1950s, and it was conducted by Bulcsu Laszlo, Croatian linguist, who was a pioneer in machine translation during the 1950s in Yugoslavia. To put the research of the Croatian group in the right context, we have to explore the origin of the idea of machine translation. The idea of machine translation is an old one, and its origin is commonly connected with the work of Rene Descartes, i.e. to his idea of universal language, as described in his letter to Mersenne from 20.xi.1629 BIBREF0. Descartes describes universal language as a simplified version of the language which will serve as an “interlanguage” for translation. That is, if we want to translate from English to Croatian, we will firstly translate from English to an “interlanguage”, and then from the “interlanguage” to Croatian. As described later in this paper, this idea had been implemented in the machine translation process, firstly in the Indonesian-to-Russian machine translation system created by Andreev, Kulagina and Melchuk from the early 1960s. In modern times, the idea of machine translation was put forth by the philosopher and logician Yehoshua Bar-Hillel (most notably in BIBREF1 and BIBREF2), whose papers were studied by the Croatian group. Perhaps the most important unrealized point of contact between machine translation and cybernetics happened in the winter of 1950/51. In that period, Bar-Hillel met Rudolf Carnap in Chicago, who introduced to him the (new) idea of cybernetics. Also, Carnap gave him the contact details of his former teaching assistant, Walter Pitts, who was at that moment with Norbert Wiener at MIT and who was supposed to introduce him to Wiener, but the meeting never took place BIBREF3. Nevertheless, Bar-Hillel was to stay at MIT where he, inspired by cybernetics, would go to organize the first machine translation conference in the world in 1952 BIBREF3. The idea of machine translation was a tempting idea in the 1950s. The main military interest in machine translation as an intelligence gathering tool (translation of scientific papers, daily press, technical reports, and everything the intelligence services could get their hands on) was sparked by the Soviet advance in nuclear technology, and would later be compounded by the success of Vostok 1 (termed by the USA as a “strategic surprise”). In the nuclear age, being able to read and understand what the other side was working on was of crucial importance BIBREF4. Machine translation was quickly absorbed in the program of the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence in 1956 (where Artificial Intelligence as a field was born), as one of the five core fields of artificial intelligence (later to be known as natural language processing). One other field was included here, the “nerve nets” as they were known back then, today commonly known as artificial neural networks. What is also essential for our discussion is that the earliest programming language for artificial intelligence, Lisp, was invented in 1958 by John McCarthy BIBREF5. But let us take a closer look at the history of machine translation. In the USA, the first major wave of government and military funding for machine translation came in 1954, and the period of abundancy lasted until 1964, when the National Research Council established the Automatic Language Processing Advisory Committee (ALPAC), which was to assess the results of the ten years of intense funding. The findings were very negative, and funding was almost gone BIBREF4, hence the ALPAC report became the catalyst for the first “AI Winter”. One of the first recorded attempts of producing a machine translation system in the USSR was in 1954 BIBREF6, and the attempt was applauded by the Communist party of the Soviet Union, by the USSR Committee for Science and Technology and the USSR Academy of Sciences. The source does not specify how this first system worked, but it does delineate that the major figures of machine translation of the time were N. Andreev of the Leningrad State University, O. Kulagina and I. Melchuk of the Steklov Mathematical Institute. There is information on an Indonesian-to-Russian machine translation system by Andreev, Kulagina and Melchuk from the early 1960s, but it is reported that the system was ultimately a failure, in the same way early USA systems were. The system had statistical elements set forth by Andreev, but the bulk was logical and knowledge-heavy processing put forth by Kulagina and Melchuk. The idea was to have a logical intermediate language, under the working name “Interlingua”, which was the connector of both natural languages, and was used to model common-sense human knowledge. For more details, see BIBREF6. In the USSR, there were four major approaches to machine translation in the late 1950s BIBREF7. The first one was the research at the Institute for Precise Mechanics and Computational Technology of the USSR Academy of Sciences. Their approach was mostly experimental and not much different from today's empirical methods. They evaluated the majority of algorithms known at the time algorithms over meticulously prepared datasets, whose main strength was data cleaning, and by 1959 they have built a German-Russian machine translation prototype. The second approach, as noted by Mulić BIBREF7, was championed by the team at the Steklov Mathematical Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences led by A. A. Reformatsky. Their approach was mainly logical, and they extended the theoretical ideas of Bar-Hillel BIBREF2 to build three algorithms: French-Russian, English-Russian and Hungarian-Russian. The third and perhaps the most successful approach was the one by A. A. Lyapunov, O. S. Kulagina and R. L. Dobrushin. Their efforts resulted in the formation of the Mathematical Linguistics Seminar at the Faculty of Philology in Moscow in 1956 and in Leningrad in 1957. Their approach was mainly information-theoretic (but they also tried logic-based approaches BIBREF7), which was considered cybernetic at that time. This was the main role model for the Croatian efforts from 1957 onwards. The fourth, and perhaps most influential, was the approach at the Experimental Laboratory of the Leningrad University championed by N. D. Andreev BIBREF7. Here, the algorithms for Indonesian-Russian, Arabic-Russian, Hindu-Russian, Japanese-Russian, Burmese-Russian, Norwegian-Russian, English-Russian, Spanish-Russian and Turkish-Russian were being built. The main approach of Andreev's group was to use an intermediary language, which would capture the meanings BIBREF7. It was an approach similar to KL-ONE, which would be introduced in the West much later (in 1985) by Brachman and Schmolze BIBREF8. It is also interesting to note that the Andreev group had a profound influence on the Czechoslovakian machine translation program BIBREF9, which unfortunately suffered a similar fate as the Yugoslav one due to the lack of funding. Andreev's approach was in a sense "external". The modelling would be statistical, but its purpose would not be to mimic the stochasticity of the human thought process, but rather to produce a working machine translation system. Kulagina and Melchuk disagreed with this approach as they thought that more of what is presently called "philosophical logic" was needed to model the human thought process at the symbolic level, and according to them, the formalization of the human thought process was a prerequisite for developing a machine translation system (cf. BIBREF6). We could speculate that sub-symbolic processing would have been acceptable too, since that approach is also rooted in philosophical logic as a way of formalizing human cognitive functions and is also "internal" in the same sense symbolic approaches are. There were many other centers for research in machine translation: Gorkovsky University (Omsk), 1st Moscow Institute for Foreign Languages, Computing Centre of the Armenian SSR and at the Institute for Automatics and Telemechanics of the Georgian SSR BIBREF7. It is worthwhile to note that both the USA and the USSR had access to state-of-the-art computers, and the political support for the production of such systems meant that computers were made available to researchers in machine translation. However, the results were poor in the late 1950s, and a working system was yet to be shown. All work was therefore theoretical work implemented on a computer, which proved to be sub-optimal.

Question: How does this research compare to research going on in the US and USSR at this time?
Answer: Author of this research noted the USA prototype effort from 1954 and research papers in 1955as well as USSR effort from 1955.