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Syntactic mismatches in machine translation

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Machine Translation

Abstract

This paper addresses one of the central problems arising at the transfer stage in machine translation: syntactic mismatches, that is, mismatches between a source-language sentence structure and its equivalent target-language sentence structure. The level at which we assume the transfer to be carried out is the Deep-Syntactic Structure (DSyntS) as proposed in the Meaning-Text Theory (MTT). DSyntS is abstract enough to avoid all types of divergences that result either from restricted lexical co-occurrence or from surface-syntactic discrepancies between languages. As for the remaining types of syntactic divergences, all of them occur not only interlinguistically, but also intralinguistically; this means that establishing correspondences between semantically equivalent expressions of the source and target languages that diverge with respect to their syntactic structure is nothing else than paraphrasing. This allows us to adapt the powerful intralinguistic paraphrasing mechanism developed in MTT for purposes of interlinguistic transfer.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Linguistics and Translation, University of Montreal, C.P. 6128 “Centre-Ville”, Montreal, QC, Canada, H3C 3J7

    Igor Mel’čuk

  2. Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats (ICREA) and Department of Technology, Pompeu Fabra University, Passeig de Circumval·lació 8, Barcelona, 08003, Spain

    Leo Wanner

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Correspondence to Igor Mel’čuk.

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Mel’čuk, I., Wanner, L. Syntactic mismatches in machine translation. Machine Translation 20, 81–138 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10590-006-9013-7

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