ULTRA is a machine translation system created for five languages (Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, English, and German) in the Computing Research Laboratory in 1991.
ULTRA (Universal Language Translator), is a machine translation system developed at the Computing Research Laboratory,[1] which can translate between five languages (Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, English and German). It uses Artificial intelligence as well as linguistic and logic programming methods. The main goal of the system is to be robust, to cover general language and to be simple to use. It uses bidirectional parsers/generators.
The system has a language-independent system of intermediate representation, which means that it takes into account needs for expression (expression is one of the main elements of language) and it uses relaxation techniques to provide the best translation. It used an X Window user interface.[2]
Users paste a sentence into the "source" window. They chose a target language and press Translate.[3] The tool translates the source text, taking into consideration what is said, how it is said and why it is said.
Lexical entries in the system have two parts:
ULTRA works with Intermediate representation of the language between the systems, so no transfer takes place. Each language has its own systems, which are independent. Having the independent systems gives an extra benefit. Adding another language does not disrupt existing language translations.
Developers David Farwell and Yorick Wilks created IR (interlingual representation). It was a base for analyzing and generating expressions.[4]
They analyzed many different types of communications (business letters, documents, emails) to compare the communication style. ULTRA looks for the best words for some kinds of information and good forms and equivalents for some expression in target language.