4 research outputs found
An English-to-Turkish interlingual MT system
This paper describes the integration of a Turkish generation system with the KANT knowledge-based machine translation system to produce a prototype English-Turkish interlingua-based machine translation system. These two independently constructed systems were successfully integrated within a period of two months, through development of a module which maps KANT interlingua expressions to Turkish syntactic structures. The combined system is able to translate completely and correctly 44 of 52 benchmark sentences in the domain of broadcast news captions. This study is the first known application of knowledge-based machine translation from English to Turkish, and our initial results show promise for future development. Ā© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 1998
Design and Implementation of a Tactical Generator for Turkish, a Free Constituent Order Language
This thesis describes a tactical generator for Turkish, a free constituent
order language, in which the order of the constituents may change according to
the information structure of the sentences to be generated. In the absence of
any information regarding the information structure of a sentence (i.e., topic,
focus, background, etc.), the constituents of the sentence obey a default
order, but the order is almost freely changeable, depending on the constraints
of the text flow or discourse. We have used a recursively structured finite
state machine for handling the changes in constituent order, implemented as a
right-linear grammar backbone. Our implementation environment is the GenKit
system, developed at Carnegie Mellon University--Center for Machine
Translation. Morphological realization has been implemented using an external
morphological analysis/generation component which performs concrete morpheme
selection and handles morphographemic processes.Comment: M.Sc. Thesis submitted to the Department of Computer Engineering and
Information Science, Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey. 146 pages (including
title pages). Also available as:
ftp://ftp.cs.bilkent.edu.tr/pub/tech-reports/1996/BU-CEIS-9614.ps.
The Computational Analysis of the Syntax and Interpretation of Free Word Order in Turkish
In this dissertation, I examine a language with āfreeā word order, specifically Turkish, in order to develop a formalism that can capture the syntax and the context-dependent interpretation of āfreeā word order within a computational framework. In āfreeā word order languages, word order is used to convey distinctions in meaning that are not captured by traditional truth-conditional semantics. The word order indicates the āinformation structureā, e.g. what is the ātopicā and the āfocusā of the sentence. The context-appropriate use of āfreeā word order is of considerable importance in developing practical applications in natural language interpretation, generation, and machine translation.
I develop a formalism called Multiset-CCG, an extension of Combinatory Categorial Grammars, CCGs, (Ades/Steedman 1982, Steedman 1985), and demonstrate its advantages in an implementation of a data-base query system that interprets Turkish questions and generates answers with contextually appropriate word orders. Multiset-CCG is a context-sensitive and polynomially parsable grammar that captures the formal and descriptive properties of āfreeā word order and restrictions on word order in simple and complex sentences (with discontinuous constituents and long distance dependencies). Multiset-CCG captures the context-dependent meaning of word order in Turkish by compositionally deriving the predicate-argument structure and the information structure of a sentence in parallel. The advantages of using such a formalism are that it is computationally attractive and that it provides a compositional and flexible surface structure that allows syntactic constituents to correspond to information structure constituents. A formalism that integrates information structure and syntax such as Multiset-CCG is essential to the computational tasks of interpreting and generating sentences with contextually appropriate word orders in āfreeā word order languages