This paper describes Expedition, an environment designed to facilitate the quick ramp-up of MT systems from practically any alphabetic language (L) into English. The central component of Expedition is a knowledge elicitation system that guides a lin- guistically naive bilingual speaker through the process of describing L in terms of its eco- logical, morphological, grammatical, lexical, and transfer information. Expedition also includes a module for converting the elicited information into the format expected by the underlying MT system and an MT engine that relies on both the elicited knowledge and resident knowledge about English. The Expedition environment is integrated using a con- figuration and control system. Expedition represents an innovative approach to answering the need for rapid-configuration MT by preparing an MT system in which the only miss- ing link is information about L, which is elicited in a structured fashion such that it can be directly exploited by the system.
McShane, M., S. Nirenburg, J. Cowie and R. Zacharski. 2002. Embedding knowledge elicitation and MT systems within a single architecture. Machine Translation 17(4):271-305.