This paper takes a preliminary look at the relation between verb pattern
matches in the Pattern Dictionary of English Verbs (PDEV) and translation quality
through a qualitative analysis of human-ranked sentences from 5 different
machine translation systems. The purpose of the analysis is not only to determine
whether verbs in the automatic translations and their immediate contexts match
any pre-existing semanto-syntactic pattern in PDEV, but also to establish links
between hypothesis sentences and the verbs in the reference translation. It
attempts to answer the question of whether or not the semantic and syntactic
information captured by Corpus Pattern Analysis (CPA) can indicate whether a
sentence is a “good” translation. Two human annotators manually identified the
occurrence of patterns in 50 translations and indicated whether these patterns
match any identified pattern in the corresponding reference translation. Results
indicate that CPA can be used to distinguish between well and ill-formed
sentences
