On Halliday’s Thoughts Of Machine Translation

In Halliday’s academic activities, the study on computer and quantitative language is one important part. From the1950s, he carried out a research of machine translation and mechanical dictionary from the perspective of rank-scale and categorical grammar, and published a series of important papers. Since then, he has opened and promoted the application and development of Systemic Functional Grammar in natural language processing.This paper adopted the literature method, and conducted a qualitative research of Halliday’s thoughts on machine translation. The main contents included two basic parts: Halliday’s thoughts on machine translation and mechanical dictionary. The first part summarized the following viewpoints:machine translation from the perspective of Applied Linguistics and the design of machine translation system, and fully affirmed his forward-looking ideas in this field. The second part mainly analyzed his thesaurus method and its important role in machine translation. At the same time, this paper also pointed out some shortcomings in Halliday’s study, such as the lack of concrete data and semantic processing.The study has been done with a wide range of value and meaning:first of all, it is able to more fully understand the application depth and breadth of Systemic Functional Linguistics in natural language processing. Secondly, it is a benefit to draw a research route combining the linguistic, mathematical and logic method with the computer technology, which thereby changes the prevailing prejudices on the scientific aspects of Systemic Functional Linguistics. In addition, the study of rank-scale and categorical grammar in areas such as Computational Linguistics, can in turn reflect some problems of the theory itself, and scientifically explore its intrinsic motivation to Systemic Grammar and Functional Grammar...