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Machine Translation among Languages with Transitivity Divergences Using the Causal Relation in the Interlingual Lexicon

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Machine Translation and the Information Soup (AMTA 1998)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 1529))

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abstract

This paper proposes a design of verb entries in Interlingua to facilitate the machine translation (MT) of two languages with transitivity divergence as derived from their shared and individual linguistic characteristics. It suggests that the transitivity difference is best treated with verb entries containing information of the causal relation of the expressed events. It also demonstrates how the proposed design of verb entries gives a principled treatment of aspect divergence in semantically corresponding verbs of a source language (SL) and a target language (TL). Although the current paper focuses on English and Japanese, the proposed treatment should be applicable to the MT of similarly divergent languages, since the proposed lexicon in language-independent Interlingua contains information on causal relations of events as necessary to bridge the transitivity difference.

I wish to thank two anonymous reviewers of AMTA 98 for their valuable comments on an earlier version of this paper. Usual disclaimers apply.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dept. of Foreign Languages and Literatures, San Francisco State University, 1600 Holloway Avenue, San Francisco, CA, 94132

    Yukiko Sasaki Alam

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  1. Yukiko Sasaki Alam
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Computing Research Lab, New Mexico State University, Box 30001 / 3CRL, Las Cruces, NM, 88003, USA

    David Farwell

  2. SYSTRAN Inc., 7855 Fay Avenue, Suite 300, P.O. Box 907, La Jolla, CA, 92037, USA

    Laurie Gerber

  3. Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California, 4676 Admiralty Way, Marina del Rey, CA, 90292-6695, USA

    Eduard Hovy

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© 1998 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Alam, Y.S. (1998). Machine Translation among Languages with Transitivity Divergences Using the Causal Relation in the Interlingual Lexicon. In: Farwell, D., Gerber, L., Hovy, E. (eds) Machine Translation and the Information Soup. AMTA 1998. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 1529. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-49478-2_41

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-49478-2_41

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-65259-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-49478-2

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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