- 7h - 
INTERNATIONAL SOCIETY FOR PHOTOGRAMMETRY AND REMOTE SENSING 
Commission VI 
Symposium held in Mainz, FR Germany, 22 - 25 September 1982 
  
SUSSY-SO'FTWARE FOR INFORMATIVE AUTOMATIC 
TRANSLATION OF ABSTRACTS 
Heinz-Dirk Luckhardt 
SFB 100, University of Saarbrücken, FR Germany 
ABSTRACT 
The "Saarbrücker Übersetzungssystem" SUSY has been developed by the "Sonderfor- 
schungsbereich Elektronische Sprachforscnung" at the University of the Saar 
in Saarbrücken and does not aim only at the automatic translation (or machine 
translation - MT) of abstracts, but of all kinds of texts (except literary 
texts): word lists, titles of articles, abstracts with complete sentences or 
just noun phrases, and running text. In addition to this the language analysis 
part of SUSY can be used for document analysis and information gathering which 
has been proved by the project JUDO of Prof. Dr. Zimmermann. SUSY has reached 
a stage, where it can be put to the test, i.e., it is not yet ready for pro- 
duction. This paper deals with the question what the system can do and what 
is left to be done, before it can enter production. 
  
1. Dictionaries 
The main problem for the more advanced MT systems is the treatment of "unknown 
words" during the analysis of the scource language and the actual translation 
phase. SUSY can handle a large amount of them in analysis by the module for 
the segmention of compound or derivated words like Fassaden/pläne, Staellit*en/ 
bild/interpreation, Orthoprojection, EARTHNET/-/programm. A prerequisite for 
this is the completeness of the dictionary for analysis, i.e., "ortho" and 
"Projection" must be there. Most of the segmented words can be translated by 
addition of the translations of the components: ortho'projection, facade wall/ 
plan, staellite / picture / interpreation. Again, this can only be done, if 
the translations of the components are in the translation dictionary. All this 
demonstrates that relatively complete dictionaries are indispensable for a 
successful production system. The completion of the dictionaries surely cannot 
be accomplished by a research project like the SFB 100, but remains the task 
ofa potential user or a pilot project. 
2. Program system 
  
The development of SUSY started about 1972, and these ten years have produced 
a relatively stable system ith varying degrees of linguistic description for 
the different languages. As no literary translation is aimed at and a certain 
percentage of errors is expected to remain in the system, it is a question 
of "user-acceptance", whether SUSY can enter the production phase after a period 
of testing and subsequently improving the program. "User-acceptance" means 
that a user is prepared to regard the produced translation as "informative", 
i.e., he accepts it, if it gives him the desired information, and ignores certain 
stylistic deficiencies. 
Bibliographic quotation : 
Luckhardt, H.D. : SUSY - Software for informative automatic translation of abstracts. 
In: Int. Archive of Photogrammetry, 24 - VI, pp 74 - 77, Mainz 1982