Warren Weaver | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | (1894-07-17)July 17, 1894 |
| Died | November 24, 1978(1978-11-24) (aged 84) |
| Occupation(s) | Scientist,mathematician |
| Known for | Shannon–Weaver model Mason–Weaver equation Machine translation Statistical semantics |
| Awards | Kalinga Prize(1964) |
Warren Weaver (July 17, 1894 – November 24, 1978)[1] was an Americanscientist,mathematician, and science administrator.[2] He is widely recognized as one of the pioneers ofmachine translation and as an important figure in creating support for science in the United States.
Weaver received three degrees from theUniversity of Wisconsin–Madison: a Bachelor of Science in 1916, acivil engineering degree in 1917, and a Ph.D. in 1921. He became an assistant professor of mathematics at Throop College (nowCalifornia Institute of Technology). He served as a second lieutenant in theAir Service duringWorld War I. After the war, he returned to teach mathematics at Wisconsin (1920–32).[3]
Weaver was also given an honoraryLLD degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Doctor of Science degree from theUniversity of São Paulo.[4]
Weaver was director of the Division ofNatural Sciences at theRockefeller Foundation (1932–55), and was science consultant (1947–51), trustee (1954), and vice president (from 1958) at theSloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research. His chief researches were in the problems ofcommunication in science and in the mathematical theory ofprobability andstatistics.
At theRockefeller Foundation, he was responsible for approving grants for major projects inmolecular engineering andgenetics, inagriculture (particularly for developing newstrains ofwheat andrice), and inmedical research.[4]
DuringWorld War II, he was seconded from the foundation to head theApplied Mathematics Panel at the U.S.Office of Scientific Research and Development, directing the work of mathematicians inoperations research with the assistance ofMina Rees. He was familiar with the development ofelectronic calculating machines and the successful application of mathematical and statistical techniques incryptography.
He has served as a member of theDepartment of War's Research Advisory Panel and theNaval Research Advisory Committee.[4]
Weaver was elected to theAmerican Philosophical Society in 1944.[5]
He was president of theAmerican Association for the Advancement of Science in 1954 and chairman of the board in 1955, a member or chairman of numerous boards and committees, and the primary author of the Arden House Statement, a 1951 declaration of principle and guide to setting the association's goals, plans, and procedures. He also served as vice-president of the board of trustees of the Academy of Religion and Mental Health and chairman of the board of the Salk Institute of Biological Studies.[4] He was elected to theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1958.[6] TheNational Academy of Sciences chose him to be a member in 1969.[7]
WhenClaude Shannon's 1948 articles oncommunication theory were republished in 1949 asThe Mathematical Theory of Communication, the book also republished a much shorter article authored by Weaver,[4] which discusses the implications of Shannon's more technical work for a general audience.
WithMax Mason, he co-authored the bookThe Electromagnetic Field,[4] first published in 1929 and re-issued in 1959. He also authored the booksLady Luck: The Theory of Probability, first published in 1963 and republished in 1982,Elementary Mathematical Analysis, and an autobiography calledScene of Change.[4]
The home of theCourant Institute atNew York University is Warren Weaver Hall.
One naturally wonders if the problem of translation could conceivably be treated as a problem in cryptography. When I look at an article in Russian, I say: 'This is really written in English, but it has been coded in some strange symbols. I will now proceed to decode.
— Warren Weaver, Letter toNorbert Wiener, March 4, 1947
Weaver had first mentioned the possibility of usingdigital computers totranslate documents between natural humanlanguages in March 1947 in a letter to thecyberneticistNorbert Wiener. In the following two years, he had been urged by his colleagues at the Rockefeller Foundation to elaborate on his ideas. The result was a memorandum, entitled simply "Translation", which he wrote in July 1949 at Carlsbad, New Mexico.[8]
Said to be probably the single most influential publication in the early days of machine translation, it formulated goals and methods before most people had any idea of what computers might be capable of, and was the direct stimulus for the beginnings of research first in the United States and then later, indirectly, throughout the world. The impact of Weaver's memorandum is attributable not only to his widely recognized expertise in mathematics and computing, but also, and perhaps even more, to the influence he enjoyed with major policy-makers in U.S. government agencies.[9]
Weaver's memorandum was designed to suggest more fruitful methods than any simplistic word-for-word approach, which had grave limitations. He put forward four proposals. The first was that the problem of multiple meanings might be tackled by the examination of immediate context. For example, the English wordfast has at least two meanings which we can paraphrase asrapid ormotionless. If we wish to translate an English text, it is likely that these two senses offast correspond to different words in the target language, and in order to translate the word correctly one needs to know which sense is intended. Weaver proposed that this problem could be solved by looking at the words that occur in the vicinity of the word to be translated, and he conjectured that the number of context words that would be required is fairly small.
The second proposal in the memorandum was inspired by work on an early type ofneural networks byMcCulloch andPitts. Weaver interpreted these results as meaning that given a set ofpremises, any logical conclusion could be deduced automatically by computer. To the extent that human language has alogical basis, Weaver hypothesized that translation could be addressed as a problem of formal logic, deducing "conclusions" in the target language from "premises" in the source language.
The third proposal was thatcryptographic methods were possibly applicable to translation. If we want to translate, say, a Russian text into English, we can take the Russian original as anencrypted version of the Englishplaintext. Weaver was especially impressed with the potential ofShannon's classified work on cryptography andInformation theory from World War II.
Finally, the fourth proposal was that there may also belinguistic universals underlying all human languages which could be exploited to make the problem of translation more straightforward. Weaver argued for this position using ametaphor: "Think, byanalogy, of individuals living in a series of tall closed towers, all erected over a common foundation. When they try to communicate with one another, they shout back and forth, each from his own closed tower. It is difficult to make thesound penetrate even the nearest towers, and communication proceeds very poorly indeed. But, when an individual goes down his tower, he finds himself in a great open basement, common to all the towers. Here he establishes easy and useful communication with the persons who have also descended from their towers". He was inspired byErwin Reifler,[10] who in 1948 presented a paper entitled "the Chinese Language in the Light of Comparative Semantics" atthe American Philosophical Society annual conference. The abstract of the paper was published byScience in the same year, which was referred to in the memorandum.
Weaver's memorandum triggered immediate action from the part of other MT specialists. One of the first people on the scene was Erwin Reifler, mentioned in the memorandum itself.[11] In a study published in January 1950, he put forward the idea of pre- and post-editing with the assumption that fully automated translation can only be done on the basis of word-for-word substitutions, which would cause inadequacies and errors in the generated translation. His suggestion for eliminating the problem was implementing a human pre-editor with the knowledge of the output language, who would add additional symbols for grammatical, lexical and logical correctness. The post editor, in turn, would have the task of rendering the text generated by MT reasonable and logical; ideally, he would have the knowledge of the source language.[11]
Weaver understood how greatly the tools and techniques ofphysics andchemistry could advance knowledge ofbiological processes, and used his position in the Rockefeller Foundation to identify, support, and encourage the young scientists who years later earnedNobel Prizes and other honours for their contributions togenetics ormolecular biology.
In her officialNational Academy of Sciences biographical memoir for Warren,Mina Rees states:“Religion was a major enthusiasm after his family, which came first, and his work, which came second. From earliest childhood, church was a family ritual, and in adulthood, it had become a cherished part of Sunday's special quality.For years there seemed to be no need to question the interrelationship between science and religion; each played an important role in Weaver's life, but he felt no conflict between them. When he decided in the 1950s that he should examine the conflict many other people did feel, his conclusion was that he could find none between a properly humble science and a properly intelligent religion.He became the scientist par excellence who was often invited to speak at churches and at religious gatherings. Whenever he published an article on this subject, it was widely reprinted. One article, "A Scientist Ponders Faith", was published in theSaturday Review of January 3, 1959, and was reprinted by nine other publications during the next two years.Weaver was convinced that there was a permanent core of truth in religion as there is in science and that religious ideas, like scientific ones, evolve with the acquisition of new knowledge. He was perfectly comfortable with his conclusions, realizing full well that they did not conform with the bulk of religious opinion.”[12]
Weaver was awarded thePublic Welfare Medal by theNational Academy of Sciences in 1957.[13] In 1965, he was awarded the firstArches of Science Medal for outstanding contributions to the public understanding of the meaning of science to contemporary men and women, andUNESCO'sKalinga Prize for distinguished contributions to the popular understanding of science.
He also received theMedal for Merit, a position as an officer in theLegion of Honour, and theKing's Medal for Service in the Cause of Freedom.[4]
Weaver was fascinated byLewis Carroll'sAlice's Adventures in Wonderland. In 1964, having built up a collection of 160 versions in 42 languages, Weaver wrote a book about the translation history of Alice, calledAlice in Many Tongues: The Translations of Alice in Wonderland.[14] Among other features, it provides excerpts from the business correspondence of the author, Lewis Carroll (the Reverend Charles Dodgson), dealing with publishing royalties and permissions as Alice's fame snowballed worldwide. Ever the scientist, even in the area of literature, Weaver devised a design for evaluating the quality of the various translations, focusing on the nonsense, puns and logical jokes in the Mad Tea-Party scene. His range of contacts provided an impressive if eccentric list of collaborators in the evaluation exercise, including anthropologistMargaret Mead (for the South PacificPidgin translation), longtime Jerusalem mayorTeddy Kollek, and Nobel laureate biochemistHugo Theorell (Swedish). The bookAlice in a World of Wonderlands (2015) continues and updates Weaver's endeavour, analyzingAlice translations in 174 languages in a similar vein.[15]
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