Identifier: belltelephone6667mag00amerrich (find matches)
Title: Bell telephone magazine
Year: 1966 (1960s)
Authors: American Telephone and Telegraph Company American Telephone and Telegraph Company. Information Dept
Subjects: Telephone
Publisher: (New York, American Telephone and Telegraph Co., etc.)
Contributing Library: Prelinger Library
Digitizing Sponsor: Internet Archive

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FASE was devised by Dr. Lee E. McMahon, who is a psychologist studying ways of improving communications between computers and people. His work at Bell Labs is part of research in communications sciences—an area which includes the study of future communications networks which will handle messages between computers or between man and computer. Dr. McMahon has reduced the English language to a strict form in which syntax (the orderly arrangement of a sentence) is clear and sentences are easily broken into component grammatical parts to avoid ambiguity. A sentence in FASE strictly maintains the sequence of subject, verb and object; modifiers like adjectives and adverbs, and other parts of speech must fall into line. A complicated set of rules has been devised to ensure unambiguous syntax. Dr. McMahon believes that FASE is an adequate tool for communicating a broad range of ideas and that FASE can say anything which needs saying. Since long passages of FASE may produce a somewhat flat prose, the language is most useful for applications
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in which clarity of expression is preferable to an elegant style. For this reason, its immediate application would lie in the mechanical indexing of scientific abstracts or documents. FASE also may provide a more accurate computer translation of foreign languages. Automatic translation of foreign scientific papers is growing into a big business; but the results are not always reliable. Although present mechanical translation is based on grammar to an extent, it involves complicated series of computer decision-making. To some degree, those necessary complications compensate for inherent ambiguities in the language being used. FASE, which removes the syntactic ambiguities in English, would simplify the task of the computer and lessen the chance of error.
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