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NSM Translator

The NSM Translator is an exciting development at the interface between NSM semantics and NLP, under development by Francesco Zamblera. (The acronym NLP refers to the field of Natural Language Processing, essentially, a branch of computer science and language technology that is concerned with manipulating text and speech using computers.)

Zamblera has devised an automatic translator that converts between English NSM and Spanish NSM. You can find an initial version at www.vilnergoy.org/nsm

(You may to be patient as the main page loads. It has lots of javascript sitting underneath it.)

The current version of the NSM Translator is written in javascript and is based on pattern mataching: a pattern in the source language is recognised and converted to the corresponding pattern in the target language. Prior to the pattern matching, the input text is analysed morphologogically. The javascript source code is described in a pdf article by Zamblera available at the same site. He is also working on a different translation strategy that uses PROLOG to create a parser and generator.

The theoretical significance of Zamblera's work is that it demonstrates that the NSM metalanguage is "well-specified" and computationally tractable.