PRACTICAL EXPERIENCE OF MACHINE TRANSLATION V. Lawson (ed.) 129 North-Holland Publishing Company / ©ASLIB, 1982 QUALITY CONTROL PROCEDURES IN MODIFICATION OF THE AIR FORCE RUSSIAN-ENGLISH MT SYSTEM

The paper gives the background leading to the development of current quality control procedures used in modification of the Russian-English system. A special program showing target language translation differences has become the central control mechanism. Procedures for modification of dictionaries, homographs and lexicals, and generalized linguistic modules are discussed in detail. A final assessment is made of the procedures and the quantitative results that can be obtained when they are used. The Air Force Russian-to-English MT system, operational since July, 1970, is an immense software package that has translated about 500,000 pages of Russian text to date. Through the years the system has been enhanced by the addition of new routines and extensive modification of the dictionaries and linguistic modules. These optimization efforts were of course subjected to some degree of quality control at all stages. However, in this paper I intend to concentrate on th