Translation using Minimal Recursion Semantics

What it is about

The paper presents minimal recursion semantics (MRS), a flat semantic representation for HPSG grammars, developed for the Verbmobil spoken-dialogue translation project. MRS is a meta-level description of semantic structures; it allows underspecification and gives a list of relations with no deep nesting. The authors argue that such minimal structure makes semantic transfer and generation simpler, because transfer rules match relations one by one and the generator does not have to undo nesting. The representation uses both language-specific predicates and interlingual ones, so that different lexical semantic approaches can be tried within the same framework. The paper shows examples and compares the approach with earlier unification-based transfer. It gives no quantitative results. The authors note that the cost is efficiency, since the generator loses syntactic clues that a structured input would give.

Ideas

• I1. Flat meta-world: store the meta tokens as a list of relations with handles and arguments, not as a nested tree. Then the encoder can reorder the relations freely. Compare the exact-match rate and the residual with the tree version on the same verses, twice each.
• I2. Keep both predicates: each meta token carries an interlingual concept and the source word as a language-specific predicate. The encoder may use the source predicate in the most specific context. Count how often this helps, on the Hebrew and English pairs.
• I3. Underspecified concepts: a meta token whose concept is not yet decided (the cases of the verbs be and have) stays open until the encoder's context settles it. Log these tokens and count the bits they cost in the residual.

For Mova

The code is tools/translate/src/meta.rs (the concept layer) and en/src/lin.rs, which bears the generator's cost. The flat form is a representation choice Mova can measure, not one to adopt on faith; the paper's own warning that generation loses syntactic clues is the thing the test should check.

Topics: Machine translation

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@inproceedings{copestake1995translation,
  title = {{Translation using Minimal Recursion Semantics}},
  author = {Copestake, Ann and Flickinger, Dan and Malouf, Rob and Riehemann, Susanne and Sag, Ivan},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Sixth Conference on Theoretical and Methodological Issues in Machine Translation of Natural Languages},
  year = {1995},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/1995.tmi-1.2/}
}

References

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