Machine Translation among Languages with Transitivity Divergences Using the Causal Relation in the Interlingual Lexicon

• Authors: Yukiko Sasaki Alam
• Venue: AMTA '98 Proceedings of the Third Conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas on Machine Translation and the Information Soup
• Year: 1998

This paper proposes a design of verb entries in Interlingua to facilitate the machine translation (MT) of two languages with transitivity divergence as derived from their shared and individual linguistic characteristics. It suggests that the transitivity difference is best treated with verb entries containing information of the causal relation of the expressed events. It also demonstrates how the proposed design of verb entries gives a principled treatment of aspect divergence in semantically corresponding verbs of a source language (SL) and a target language (TL). Although the current paper focuses on English and Japanese, the proposed treatment should be applicable to the MT of similarly divergent languages, since the proposed lexicon in language-independent Interlingua contains information on causal relations of events as necessary to bridge the transitivity difference.