Next: MiMo Up: AN APPROACH TO SENTENCE-LEVEL Previous: AN APPROACH TO SENTENCE-LEVEL
Introduction
Theoretical research as part of machine translation often aims at finding
an appropriate formalism. One of the main issues involved is whether
the formalism does full justice to the idea that the translation of a whole
is built from the translation of its parts on the one hand and whether
it leaves enough room for the treatment of exceptions on the other hand.
In other words, the question is in what way the idea of compositionality is
to be defined within a particular formalism.
An answer to this question from an interlingual perspective is given in
the literature on the Rosetta system (e.g. Landsbergen 1985).
The CAT framework (e.g. Arnold et al. 1986)
was meant to be an answer to the same question, this time
for
a transfer system, viz. the Eurotra system.
The MiMo formalism is a reaction to the CAT
framework and tries to solve several translation problems by formulating
an alternative
definition of compositionality.
Phenomena involving anaphora 
such as wh-movement and the coindexation of
pronominals often cause problems for strictly compositional systems since
translation of one word depends on (the translation of) another word, one
which can be quite far away in the sentence.
Rosetta tackles this problem by distinguishing between rules that are
significant with respect to the compositionality of translation,
so-called meaningful rules, and rules that are not, referred to as
transformations
(Appelo et al. 1987); in
this way the system is not compositional in the strict sense anymore.
The notion of compositionality MiMo adheres to is defined in such a way that
anaphoric relations can be translated compositionally as well.
In this paper we will introduce the anaphoric component of the MiMo
formalism.
It is used to define linguistic phenomena such as
wh-movement, the binding of reflexives and pronouns, the passive and
control phenomena monolingually. The formalism will be discussed
by means of an extensive description of a possible analysis
of wh-movement.
In the next section, we will first discuss and motivate some of the more fundamental characteristics of the MiMo translation system. Section two will sketch the MiMo formalism as far as necessary for understanding what will follow. The component that deals with the treatment of anaphora will be discussed in section 3. In the fourth section the actual working of the component will be shown by an elaborate discussion of wh-movement. Finally, the translation of anaphoric relations will be defined and some idea will be given of the kind of problems that remain and that will have to be subject to further research.
Next: MiMo Up: AN APPROACH TO SENTENCE-LEVEL Previous: AN APPROACH TO SENTENCE-LEVEL
Gertjan van Noord
Fri Nov 25 13:16:14 MET 1994