KIT-FAST was a basic-research project in the field of Machine Translation (MT) within the project group KIT. It was the Berlin component of the complementary research to EUROTRA-D, which was the German part of the European Community MT project EUROTRA, and it was funded by the Federal Minister for Research and Technology.
The major task of the complementary research was to check recent linguistic theories and AI methods and make them available for the specific problems of MT. The first phase of the Berlin project (KIT-NASEV) dealt with syntactic issues. NASEV is an ebbreviation for the project title New Algorithms for Analysis and Synthesis in MT. A constructive version of GPSG was developed and implemented as the syntactic component of an MT system.
The second phase (KIT-FAST I) concentrated on sentence semantic problems of translation. FAST is an abbreviation for Functor-Argument-Structure for Translation. The project title was Transfer and Generation on a sentence-semantic Level. The project designed and implemented a representation formalism for sentence-semantic information and corresponding components for semantic analysis, transfer and generation on the basis of term-rewriting, which have been connected withe the syntactic component of the MT system.
The third phase (KIT-FAST II) was concerned with the problem of anaphoric interpretation in MT. The title of the project was Anaphora Resolution in MT. The project developed a method for anaphora interpretation that takes a whole variety of different factors into account. The factors concern the structural prominence of an antecedent candidate as well as the conceptual consistency of a text. The latter is determined with the help of predefined background knowledge and a representation of the text content, which are represented in the TBox and ABox, respectively, of a KL-ONE based knowledge representation (KR) system. The KR system has been developed independently by the neighbour project KIT-BACK (expired).
The experimental MT system that has been developed by the project KIT-FAST is freely available via the FTP server of the Technical University of Berlin. Details for that see http://www.cs.tu-berlin.de/~ww/mtsystem.html.