A machine instant interpretation video made by the Software Company in Tian Jing in 2012 has attracted foreign language school teachers’ expectation towards computational linguistics.In the afternoon on the 12^th, Nov., Feng Zhiwei, ministry of education linguistic practical research institute researcher, doctorial supervisor, member of academic committee, delivered a speech titled “Computational Linguistics and Machine Translation”based on machine instant interpretation video for foreign language school teachers.

Mr. Feng Zhiwei, a linguist,not only understands ancient Chinese, modern Chinese, philology, phonology in linguistics and general linguistics but also understands mathematics, physics, chemistry and computational science.He has made a deep study over automatic management of phonetics, vocabulary and grammar of such languages as Chinese, English, French, German, Russian and Japanese, etc..Moreover, he has made a comprehensive application by combining different knowledge to be realized on computers, thus becoming a linguistic expert in both art and science.

During the lecture, Mr. Feng made a brief introduction of important works of computational linguistics and a detailed analysis of its germination period, development period, and prosperity period.He gave a constant account starting from Markov model, Turning Test to Chomsky’s formal linguistics; from Artsmni’s Mechanic Brain, Eckert and Mauchly’s first electronic computer to Wafer’s assumption of translation resembling decoding.Mr. Feng made use of Baidu, Google, Software and Yahoo machine translation examples to demonstrate current state and problems of machine translation.He later put forward his idea that only through the combination of linguistics and mathematics can we have a favorable prospect for machine translation.

Computational linguistics is an interdisciplinary science over which few people home and abroad have made a deep research.After the two-hour enlightening lecture, teachers and students in foreign language school have obtained a richer and comprehensive understanding of the emerging science.Meanwhile, Mr. Feng’s diligent and innovative spirit for computational linguistics has inspired all that are present, awestruck by the gray-haired scholar.