AN APPROACH TO SENTENCE-LEVEL ANAPHORA IN MACHINE TRANSLATION

Gertjan van Noord, Joke Dorrepaal, Doug Arnold
Steven Krauwer, Louisa Sadler, Louis des Tombe

Foundation of Language Technology
State University of Utrecht
Trans 10 3512 JK Utrecht

Dept of Language and Linguistics
University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park,
Colchester, C04 3SQ, UK.

Abstract:

Theoretical research in the area of machine translation usually involves the search for and creation of an appropriate formalism. An important issue in this respect is the way in which the compositionality of translation is to be defined. In this paper, we will introduce the anaphoric component of the Mimo formalism. It makes the definition and translation of anaphoric relations possible, relations which are usually problematic for systems that adhere to strict compositionality. In Mimo, the translation of anaphoric relations is compositional. The anaphoric component is used to define linguistic phenomena such as wh-movement, the passive and the binding of reflexives and pronouns monolingually. The actual working of the component will be shown in this paper by means of a detailed discussion of wh-movement.

Gertjan van Noord
Fri Nov 25 13:16:14 MET 1994