Parameterization of the interlingua in machine translation

The task of designing as interlingual machine translation system is difficult, first because the designer must have a knowledge of the principles underlying crosslinguistic distinctions for the languages under consideration, and second because the designer must then be able to incorporate this knowledge effectively into the system. This paper provides a catalog of several types of distinctions among Spanish, English, and German, and describes a parametric approach that characterizes these distinctions, both at the syntactic level and at the lexical-semantic level. The approach described here is implemented in a system called UNITRAN, a machine translation system that translates English, Spanish, and German bidirectionally.