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Multilingual generation: The role of telicity in lexical choice and syntactic realization

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Machine Translation

Abstract

Multilingual generation in machine translation (MT) requires a knowledge organization that facilitates the task of lexical choice, i.e. selection of lexical units to be used in the generation of a target-language sentence. This paper investigates the extent to which lexicalization patterns involving the lexical aspect feature [+telic] may be used for translating events and states among languages. Telicity has been correlated syntactically with both transitivity and unaccusativity, and semantically with Talmy's ‘path’ of a motion event, the representation of which characterizes languages parametrically.

Taking as our starting point the syntactic/semantic classification in Levin's English Verb Classes and Alternations, we examine the relation between telicity and the syntactic contexts, or alternations, outlined in this work, identifying systematic relations between the lexical aspect features and the semantic components that potentiate these alternations. Representing lexical aspect — particularly telicity — is therefore crucial for the tasks of lexical choice and syntactic realization. Having enriched the data in Levin (by correlating the syntactic alternations (Part I) and semantic verb classes (Part II) and marking them for telicity) we assign to verbs lexical semantic templates (LSTs). We then demonstrate that it is possible from these templates to build a large-scale repository for lexical conceptual structures which encode meaning components that correspond to different values of the telicity feature. The LST framework preserves both semantic content and semantic structure (following Grimshaw during the processes of lexical choice and syntactic realization. Application of this model identifies precisely where the Knowledge Representation component may profitably augment our rules of composition, to identify cases where the interlingua underlying the source language sentence must be either reduced or modified in order to produce an appropriate target language sentence.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, Department of Computer Science, University of Maryland, 20742, College Park, MD, U.S.A.

    Bonnie J. Dorr & Mari Broman Olsen

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Dorr, B.J., Olsen, M.B. Multilingual generation: The role of telicity in lexical choice and syntactic realization. Machine Translation 11, 37–74 (1996). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00349353

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