Error Detection, Recovery, and Repair in the Translation of Inorganic Nomenclatures. 1. A Study of the Problem

The treatment of errors generated in the transmission of chemical information from humans to machines is examined. Every type of human-machine communication requires a translation subprocess to deal with the various possible representations of knowledge; the present study was designed to consider errors occurring in such a subsystem. Regardless of the model employed, translation of knowledge is performed over several successive stages; at each stage different types of errors may be detected. A method is proposed to classify these errors according to the stage at which they occur, thus facilitating the generalization of the process. An analysis of errors occurring during the translation of inorganic chemical names is also presented. The particular grammatical features of different nomenclatures would require a study of the errors appearing in the human-machine communication process in modern chemistry-oriented systems, a problem which has only been touched upon in the systems proposed to date. Attention here is centered on lexicographic errors, since that stage of the translation process is completely independent of the model employed and might thus be useful in a more general sense.