Storage and computation

[Deborah D K Ruuskanen]

While wishing to second all that has been said regarding
cross-disciplinary work, I think it should be pointed out that
the field of translation may have been overlooked as a means of checking
theories of retrieval. Machine translation has tried to use every larger
memories to store and retrieve translations once made and match them
against translations to be made: this method simply does not work if the
translation to be done is not an *exact* match. So much for retrieval.
However, if it *is* an exact match, then retrieval saves mucho time for
translators, who can then concentrate on *new* translation. I think
children retrieve things in a similar way: if I used this before and it
worked in this situation, I'll try it again. If it doesn't work, the
child has to come up with something *new* and try to figure out *why* it
didn't work.
My theory is that translation works by elimination (through the
application of context) rather than scanning of everything in the
memory. This may be another way of saying that we first find *where* we
stored something, and then *retrieve* it.
And how many NLP and MT (machine translation) people are reading this
list? <sigh>
DKR
--
Deborah D. Kela Ruuskanen     \  You cannot teach a Man anything,
Leankuja 1, FIN-01420 Vantaa  \    you can only help him find it
druuskan at cc.helsinki.fi       \    within himself.      Galileo