The Thesaurus in Syntax and Semantics

The recent work of the Unit has been primarily concerned with the employment ofthesauri in machine translation. Limited success has been achieved, in punchedcardtests, in improving the idiomatic quality and so the intelligibility of an initiallyunsatisfactory translation, by word-for-word procedures, from Italian intoEnglish, by using a program which permitted selection of final equivalents from"heads" in Roget's Thesaurus, i.e. lists of synonyms, near-synonyms and associatedwords and phrases, instead of from previously determined lists of alternativetranslations. Mechanical Translation, vol.4, nos.1 and 2, November 1957; pp. 35-43]