The main problems associated with MT are outlined, and typical system architectures are briefly described. A number of linguistic theories of specific interest to MT are introduced and a brief account is given of some standard software techniques. The tutorial further attempts to show how these ideas are related to work on MT within the Artificial Intelligence paradigm. No 52, the paper is aimed at the general reader without specialist knowledge in the area. ViewGen represents the beliefs of agents as explicit, partitioned proposition-sets known as environments.
Environments are convenient, even essential, addressing important pragmatic issues of reasoning.
The paper also briefly discusses the addition of a heuristic relevance-determination procedure to ViewGen, and justifies the partitioning approach to belief ascription. Such systems allow for a mixing of strict information with defeasible information. However, few well-founded systems have been proposed and heterogeneous systems have been considered not yet well understood. This paper presents a theory and implementation of a heterogeneous inheritance system. An example of the system is explained in detail.