Synonymy and Translation

This paper is meant to give some insight into the interaction between on the one hand theoretical concepts in the field of formal semantics, and on the other hand linguistic research directed towards an application, more specifically, the research in the machine translation project Rosetta. The central notion is ‘synonymy’. It will be used to discuss sameness of meaning for expressions belonging to different languages

Subgrammars, Rule Classes and Control in the Rosetta Translation System

The paper discusses a recent extension of the linguistic framework of the Rosetta system. The original framework is elegant and has proved its value in practice, but it also has a number of deficiencies, of which the most salient is the impossibility to assign an explicit structure to the grammars. This may cause problems, especially in a situation where large grammars have to be written by a group of people. The newly developed framework enables us to divide a grammar into subgrammars in a linguistically motivated way and to control explicitly the application of rules in a subgram- mar. On the other hand it enables us to divide the set of grammar rules into rule classes in such a way that we get hold of the more difficult translation relations. The use of both these divisions naturally leads to a highly modular structure of the system, which helps in controlling its complexity. We will show that these divisions also give insight into a class of difficult translation problems in which there is a mismatch of categories

Template-based generation of natural language expressions with Controlled M-Grammar

A method is described for the generation of related natural-language expressions. The method is based on a formal grammar of the natural language in question, specified in the Controlled M-Grammar (CMG) formalism. In the CMG framework the generation of an utterance is controlled by a derivation tree, which is a semantics-oriented prescription of the order in which the components of the grammar have to be used. The method described here uses templates, partial specifications of derivation trees. Related expressions can be generated by filling up a template in various ways. It will be shown that a considerable number of related expressions can be generated by varying only a small number of items. The method is used for the generation of training material in a computer-aided language-learning (CALL) system