Computational Linguistics in Military Operations
Abstract
Computational linguistics can significantly enhance battlespace awareness and support information dominance at the operational and tactical level of war in future warfare. Discussion: Mastering culture and language in a foreign country is decisive to understand the operational environment. In addition, the ability to understand and speak a foreign language is a prerequisite to achieve truly comprehension of an unfamiliar culture. Lasting operations in Afghanistan and Iraq and the necessity to breach the language gap lead to progress in the field of Machine Translation and the development of technical solutions to close the gap in the past decade. This paper examines the current development and evaluates the strength and weaknesses of present Machine Translation. Automated language processing comprising foreign to English translation, automatic speech to text transcription, and information management and text processing is a way to mitigate the complexity to enhance battlespace awareness with current available systems. However, the only way to achieve a breakthrough in translation technology is to decode the DNA of a language. Decoding a language and process it automatically is the task of Computational Linguistics. Conclusion: The current developments in the field of Machine Translation driven by enduring military operations and of the shelf solutions are a way to mitigate the existing language gap. However, fundamental progress can only be achieved by basic research in the field of Computational Linguistics.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jan 01, 2010
- Accession Number
- ADA536664
Entities
People
- Marc U. Cropp
Organizations
- Marine Corps Combat Development Command