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Verb Semantics for English-Chinese Translation (1995)
| Venue: | Machine Translation |
| Citations: | 39 - 7 self |
BibTeX
@ARTICLE{Palmer95verbsemantics,
author = {Martha Palmer and Zhibiano Wu and Martha Palmer and Zhibiao Wu},
title = {Verb Semantics for English-Chinese Translation},
journal = {Machine Translation},
year = {1995},
pages = {59--92}
}
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Abstract
Abstract. A common practice in operationalMachine Translation (MT) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems is to assume that a verb has a xed number of senses and rely on a precompiled lexicon to achieve large coverage. This paper demonstrates that this assumption is too weak to cope with the similar problems of lexical divergences between languages and unexpected uses of words that give rise to cases outside of the pre-compiled lexicon coverage. We rst examine the lexical divergences between English verbs and Chinese verbs. We then focus on a speci c lexical selection problem { translating English change-of-state verbs into Chinese verb compounds. We show that an accurate translation depends not only on information about the participants, butalsooncontextual information. Therefore, selectional restrictions on verb arguments lack the necessary power for accurate lexical selection. Second, we examine verb representation theories and practices in MT systems and show that under the xed sense assumption, the existing representation schemes are not adequate for handling these lexical divergences and extending existing verb senses to unexpected usages. We then propose a method of verb representation based on conceptual lattices which allows the similarities among di erent verbs in di erent languages to be quantitatively measured. A prototype system UNICON implements this theory and performs more accurate MT lexical selection for our chosen set of verbs. An additional lexical module for UNICON is also provided that handles sense extension.
Keyphrases
verb semantics lexical divergence english-chinese translation common practice verb representation prototype system unicon large coverage pre-compiled lexicon coverage chosen set di erent language xed number accurate translation verb sens accurate lexical selection representation scheme similar problem xed sense assumption selectional restriction english change-of-state verb sense extension chinese verb additional lexical module precompiled lexicon di erent verb unexpected usage speci lexical selection problem mt system unexpected us butalsooncontextual information chinese verb compound natural language processing operationalmachine translation conceptual lattice verb argument english verb necessary power verb representation theory accurate mt lexical selection
