Document Type : Original Article

Authors

• Ebrahim Ezzati Larsari ¹
• Ali Akbar Khasseh ²

¹ ,Department of linguistics and foreign languages, Payame Noor University, Tehran, Iran

² Department of Knowledge and Information Science, Payame Noor University, Tehran,, Iran

Abstract

This study tries to uncover the historical roots and influential publications in Machine Translation (MT) via a bibliometric analysis technique called RPYS. Preliminary data of study has been extracted from Web of Science concerning papers related to the MT from 1900 to 2021. Results exposed that the supreme enterprise of MT was initiated by Shannon in 1948; the one who illuminated the notion of entropy in information technology. After that, Weaver contributed to the appearance of statistical word by word MT in 1949. Moreover, it was Levenshtein(1966) who introduced the revolutionary notion of binary codes capable of correcting deletions, insertions, and reversals in MT. In addition, Dempster et al. (1977) presented a novel statistical EM algorithm concerning maximum likelihood from incomplete data. Later, the works of scholars Brown et al. (1993), Hochreiter (1997), Papineni et al. (2002), and Koehn et al. (2007) have been instrumental in shaping and developing MT.In overall, MT has been developed tremendously during the recent years. More precisely, it seems to be fair to say that it was the language of mathematics (0&1), as well as statistics (optimal estimation) that could feed any linguistic information into machines and computers to be processed naturally. Furthermore, it should be noted that the first attempts for MT began with introducing the way of feeding linguistic information into machine-compatible language by the help of mathematical coding systems. As it has been fulfilled, researchers intended to present a model based on statistical procedures in which word by word translation could be directed more accurately and precisely. Slowly but surely, the idea of word by word translation was developed into phrase-based and syntax-based translation. Meanwhile, there were lots of attempts towards the logicality, as well as the reasonability of automated translations. In view of that, researchers tried to improve the quality of translations by incorporating the context role in achieving a well-matched MT from source to the target language, especially in retrieving the semantic and pragmatic information of elliptic sentences .

Keywords

• Citation Analysis
• Machine Translation
• Scientomerics
• Referenced Publication Years Spectroscopy (RPYS)

Main Subjects

• Scientometrics