A Lexical Conceptual Approach to Generation for Machine Translation

Current approaches to generation for machine translation make use of direct-replacement templates, large grammars, and knowledge-based inferencing techniques. Not only are rules language-specific, but they are too simplistic to handle sentences that exhibit more complex phenomena. Furthermore, these systems are not easily extendable to other languages because the rules that map the internal representation to the surface form are entirely dependent on both the domain of the system and the language being generated. Finally an adequate interlingual representation has not yet been discovered; thus, knowledge-based inferencing is necessary and syntactic cross-linguistic generalization cannot be exploited. This report introduces a plan for the development of a theoretically based computational scheme of natural language generation for a translation system. The emphasis of the project is the mapping from the lexical conceptual structure of sentences to an underlying or base syntactic structure called deep structure. This approach tackles the problems of thematic and structural divergence, i.e., it allows generation of target language sentences that are not thematically or structurally equivalent to their conceptually equivalent source language counterparts. Two other more secondary tasks, construction of a dictionary and mapping from deep structure to surface structure, will also be discussed. The generator operates on a constrained grammatical theory rather than on a set of surface level tranformations.