Mechanical Translation and Computational Linguistics, Volume 6, November 1961

machine translation

In June 1956 the Washington MT group received a grant from the U.S.Air Force (Rome Air Development Center) to study the lexicographical, linguistic and engineering prerequisites for the automatic translation of scientific Russian into English, based on the photoscopic disc memory device being developed by Gilbert W. King at the International Telemeter Corporation in Los Angeles. It was charged specifically with the preparation of the Russian-English lexicon for the USAF system.

At this time, according to Reifler (1958), the “U.S.Air Force (was) primarily not interested in machine translation, but in an efficient information retrieval system permitting quick access to the enormous amount of information stored in its files.” In the initial project (1956-57) the team analyzed 111 Russian texts covering 40 scientific fields, building up a database of more than 14,000 Russian-English dictionary entries of technical and general-language vocabulary. An expanded project began in March 1957 to supplement this initial collection by adding all the inflected forms for this vocabulary (i.e. complete paradigms of nouns and verbs).

This lexicographic phase concluded in June 1959 with a Russian-English MT lexicon of 170,563 entries stored on over half a million IBM punch cards. Further grants were received from the U.S.Air Force until March 1960 to enable the Washington group to investigate other aspects of Russian-English translation ...

more interesting pointers at the john hutchins site.

actually i would like to read The function of semantics in automated language processing, but ...

the four basic ontologies of semantic interpretation

"absolute and contingent truth" or: In a right-angled triangle, it holds for the hypotenuse A and the cathetes B and C that A2 = B2 + C2 versus Your dog is doing well.