Lexical allocation in interlingua-based machine translation of spatial expressions

Given a spatial expression, or its computationalsemantic form, how is the expression’s spatial
semantics to be allocated lexically, i.e., among
entries in the lexicon? In interlingua-based ma-
chine translation (MT) research, lexical alloca-
tion is the problem of allocating or subdividing
a linguistic expression’s full interlingual (IL)
structure into the substructures that are lexical
IL forms, i.e., in the lexicon. Here we present
our work developing IL forms and an IL lexicon
for translating English spatial expressions into
Turkish. We examine several co-occurrence
patterns between motion verbs (spatial place-
ment and displacement) and directional adpo-
sitions (particles in English, postpositions in
Turkish) and the lexical allocation of spatial
vectors in these patterns