Mova0.5 pre-release⌕
☰
home / docs / papers / Machine translation / Machine Translation Divergences: A Formal Description and Proposed Solution

Machine Translation Divergences: A Formal Description and Proposed Solution

What it is about

Translation divergences are cross-linguistic differences where the same meaning comes out in a differently shaped sentence, so a direct structure-to-structure transfer breaks down. Dorr sets out seven lexical-semantic divergence types, illustrated with English, Spanish and German examples: thematic, promotional, demotional, structural, conflational, categorial and lexical. Each type is defined formally over lexical conceptual structures (LCS), which serve as the interlingua. A small set of general mapping routines plus per-language parameters, such as markers that promote or demote a head, produces the target syntax, so no language-pair transfer rules are needed. The paper argues that the classification covers all lexical-semantic divergences and that interacting divergences are handled uniformly. The text reports no corpus measurement; its support is the formal coverage argument and the UNITRAN prototype.

Ideas

For Mova

The paper is rule-based, so its ideas carry over without change. The places are tools/translate (meta.rs, measure.rs, profile.rs) and tools/roundtrip, whose divergence classes in normal mode should be checked against this list of seven. Nothing here is measured on text yet: each idea needs a count on the Bible pairs, run twice with identical output, before any claim.

Topics: Machine translation

Cite

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

@article{dorr1994machine,
  title = {{Machine Translation Divergences: A Formal Description and Proposed Solution}},
  author = {Dorr, Bonnie J.},
  journal = {Computational Linguistics},
  year = {1994},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/J94-4004/}
}

References

85 references, 7 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

  1. AbeillG Anne; Schabes, Yves; and Joshi, Aravind K. (1990). "Using lexicalized tags for machine translation." In Proceedings, 13th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Helsinki, Finland, 1-6. find
  2. Abney, S. (1989). "A computational model of human parsing." Journal of Psychol in guistic Research 18:129-144. find
  3. Allen, James E (1983). "Maintaining knowledge about temporal intervals." Communications of the ACM 26(11):832-843. find
  4. Allen, James E (1984). "Towards a general theory of action and time." Artificial Intelligence 23(2):123-160. find
  5. Alonso, Juan Alberto. (1990). "Transfer interstructure: designing an 'interlingua' for transfer-based MT systems." In Proceedings, Third International Conference on Theoretical and Methodological Issues in Machine Translation of Natural Languages, Linguistics Research Center, The University of Texas, Austin, Texas, 189-201. find
  6. Arnold, Doug, and des Tombe, Louis. (1987). "Basic theory and methodology in Eurotra." In Machine Translation: Theoretical and Methodological Issues, edited by Sergei Nirenburg, 114-135. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. find
  7. Barnett, Jim; Mani, Inderjeet; Martin, Paul; and Rich, Elaine (1991a). "Reversible machine translation: What to do when the languages don't line up." In Proceedings, Workshop on Reversible Grammars in Natural Language Processing, ACL-91, University of California, Berkeley, California, 61-70. find our card
  8. Barnett, Jim; Mani, Inderjeet; Rich, Elaine; Aone, Chinatsu; Knight, Kevin; and Martinez, Juan C. (1991b). "Capturing language-specific semantic distinctions in interlingua-based MT." In Proceedings, Machine Translation Summit, Washington, DC, 25-32. find our card
  9. Beaven, John (1992a). "Lexicalist unification-based machine translation." Doctoral dissertation, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK. find
  10. Beaven, John (1992b). "Shake and bake machine translation." In Proceedings, 14th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Nantes, France, 603-609. find
  11. Boguraev, Branimir, and Briscoe, Ted (1989). Computational Lexicography for Natural Language Processing. London: Longman. find
  12. Boguraev, Branimir, and Pustejovsky, James (1990). "Lexical ambiguity and the role of knowledge representation in lexical design." In Proceedings, 13th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Helsinki, Finland, 36-41. find
  13. Boitet, Christian (1987). "Research and development on MT and related techniques at Grenoble University (GETA)." In Machine Translation: The State of the Art, edited by Margaret King, 133-153. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh. find
  14. Brent, Michael (1993). "From grammar to lexicon: Unsupervised learning of lexical syntax." Computational Linguistics 19(2):243-262. find
  15. Briscoe, E. J., and Copestake, A. A. (1990). "Enjoy the paper: Lexical semantics via lexicology." In Proceedings, 13th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Helsinki, Finland, 42-47. find
  16. Byrd, Roy J., Calzolari, Nicoletta; Chodorow, Martin S.; Klavans, Judith L.; Neff, Mary S.; and Rizk, Omneya A. (1987). "Tools and methods for computational linguistics." Computational Linguistics 13(3-4):219-240. find
  17. Carbonell, Jaime G., and Tomita, Masaru (1987). "Knowledge-based machine translation, the CMU approach." In Machine Translation: Theoretical and Methodological Issues, edited by Sergei Nirenburg, 68-89. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. find
  18. Chomsky, Noam A. (1981). Lectures on Government and Binding. Dordrecht, Holland: Foris Publications. find
  19. Chomsky, Noam A. (1982). Some Concepts and Consequences of the Theory of Government and Binding. Cambridge: MIT Press. find
  20. Chomsky, Noam A. (1986a). Barriers. Cambridge: MIT Press. find
  21. Chomsky, Noam A. (1986b). Knowledge of Language: Its Nature, Origin and Use. Cambridge: MIT Press. find
  22. Copeland, C.; Durand, J.; Krauwer, S.; and Maegaard, B. (1991). "The Eurotra linguistic specifications." In Studies in Machine Translation and Natural Language Processing, Volume 1, edited by Erwin Valentini. Brussels: Commission of the European Communities. find
  23. Derr, M., and McKeown, K. (1984). "Using focus to generate complex and simple sentences." In Proceedings, Tenth International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Stanford, California, 319-326. find
  24. Dorr, Bonnie J. (1990a). "A cross-linguistic approach to machine translation." In Proceedings, Third International Conference on Theoretical and Methodological Issues in Machine Translation of Natural Languages, Linguistics Research Center, The University of Texas, Austin, Texas, 13-32. find
  25. Dorr, Bonnie J. (1990b). "Solving thematic divergences in machine translation." In Proceedings, 28th Annual Conference of the Association for Computational Linguistics, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 127-134. find our card
  26. Dorr, Bonnie J. (1992a). "Lexical semantics for interlingual machine translation." Machine Translation 7(3). find
  27. Dorr, Bonnie J. (1992b). "A parameterized approach to integrating aspect with lexical-semantics for machine translation." In Proceedings, 30th Annual Conference of the Association of Computational Linguistics, University of Delaware, Newark Delaware, 257-264. find
  28. Dorr, Bonnie J. (1993a). "lnterlingual machine translation: A parameterized approach." Artificial Intelligence 63(1,2). find
  29. Dorr, Bonnie J. (1993b). Machine Translation: A View from the Lexicon. Cambridge: MIT Press. find
  30. Dorr, Bonnie J., and Gaasterland, Terry (1992). "Reflecting time in generated text: Tense, aspect and temporal connecting words." Technical report UMIACS TR 92-92, CS TR 2950, Department of Computer Science, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland. find
  31. Dorr, Bonnie J., and Voss, Clare R. (1993a). "Constraints on the space of MT divergences." In Building Lexicons for Machine Translation, Papers from the 1993 Spring Symposium, Technical report SS-93-02, Stanford University, Stanford, California. find
  32. Dorr, Bonnie J., and Voss, Clare R. (1993b). Machine translation of spatial expressions: Defining the relation between an interlingua and a knowledge representation system." In Proceedings, Twelfth Conference of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, Washington, DC. find
  33. Farwell, David; Guthrie, Louise; and Wilks, Yorick (1992). "The automatic creation of lexical entries for a multilingual MT system." In Proceedings, 14th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Nantes, France, 532-538. find
  34. Goldman, Neil M. (1975). "Conceptual memory and inference." In Conceptual Information P~ocessing, edited by Roger C. Schank, 289-371. Amsterdam, Holland: Elsevier Science Publishers. find
  35. Granville, Robert (1983). "Cohesion in computer text generation: Lexical substitution." Technical Report, LCS Technical Report 310, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts. find
  36. Hale, Kenneth, and Keyser, S. Jay (1986a). "Some transitivity alternations in English." Technical report, Lexicon Project Working Paper 7, Center for Cognitive Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts. find
  37. Hale, Kenneth, and Keyser, S. Jay (1986b). "A view from the middle." Technical report, Lexicon Project Working Paper 10, Center for Cognitive Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts. find
  38. Hale, Kenneth, and Keyser, S. Jay (1989). "On some syntactic rules in the lexicon." Technical Report, Center for Cognitive Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts. find
  39. Hale, Kenneth, and Laughren, Mary (1983). "Warlpiri lexicon project: Warlpiri dictionary entries." Technical report, Warlpiri Lexicon Project, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts. find
  40. Hornstein, Norbert (1990). As Time Goes By. Cambridge: MIT Press. find
  41. Hovy, Eduard (1988). Generating Natural Language Under Pragmatic Constraints. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. find
  42. Isabelle, Pierre (1987). "Machine translation at the TAUM group." In Machine Translation: The State of the Art, edited by Margaret King, 247-277. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. find
  43. Jackendoff, Ray S. (1983). Semantics and Cognition. Cambridge: MIT Press. find
  44. Jackendoff, Ray S. (1990). Semantic Structures. Cambridge: MIT Press. find
  45. Jacobs, Paul S. (1985). "PHRED: A generator for natural language interfaces." Computational Linguistics 11(4):219-242. find
  46. Johnson, Rod; King, Maghi; and des Tombe, Louis (1985). "Eurotra: A multilingual system under development." Computational Linguistics 11(2,3):155-169. find
  47. Kameyama, Megumi; Ochitani, Ryo; Peters, Stanley; and Sirai, Hidetoshi (1991). "Resolving translation mismatches with information flow." In Proceedings, 29th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, University of California, Berkeley, California, 193-200. find
  48. Kaplan, Ronald M., and Bresnan, Joan (1982). "Lexical-functional grammar: A formal system for grammatical representation." In The Mental Representation of Grammatical Relations, edited by Joan Bresnan, 173-28l. Cambridge: MIT Press. find
  49. Kaplan, Ronald M.; Netter, Klaus; Wedekind, Jurgen; and Zaenen, Annie (1989). "Translation by structural correspondences." In Proceedings, Fourth Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Manchester, UK, 272-281. find our card
  50. Kay, Martin (1984). "Functional unification grammar: A formalism for machine translation." In Proceedings, lOth International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Stanford University, Stanford, California, 75-78. find
  51. Kinoshita, Satoshi; Phillips, John; and Tsujii, Jun-ichi (1992). Interaction between structural changes in machine translation." In Proceedings, 14th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Nantes, France, 679-685. find
  52. Kittredge, Richard I.; Iordanskaja, Lidija; and Polgu6re, Alain (1988). "Multi-lingual text generation and the meaning-text theory." In Proceedings, Conference on Theoretical and Methodological Issues in Machine Translation of Natural Languages, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. find
  53. Levin, Beth, and Rappaport, Malka (1986). "The formation of adjectival passives." Linguistic Inquiry 17:623-662. find
  54. Lindop, Jeremy, and Tsujii, Jun-ichi (1991). "Complex transfer in MT: A survey of examples." Technical report, CCL/UMIST Report 91/5, Center for Computational Linguistics, UMIST, Manchester, UK. find
  55. Marantz, Alec (1992). "The way-constructions and the semantics of direct arguments in English: A reply to Jackendoff." Technical report, Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts. find
  56. McCord, Michael C. (1989). "Design of LMT: A prolog-based machine translation system." Computational Linguistics 15(1):33-52. find our card
  57. McKeown, Kathleen (1985). Text generation: Using discourse strategies and focus constraints to generate natural language text. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. find
  58. Melby, A. K. (1986). "Lexical transfer: Missing element in linguistic theories." In Proceedings, 11th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Bonn, Germany. find
  59. Meyer, Ingrid; Onyshkevych, Boyan; and Carlson, Lynn (1990). "Lexicographic principles and design for knowledge-based machine translation." Technical report, CMU CMT Technical Report 90-118, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. find
  60. Montemagni, Simonetta; and Vanderwende, Lucy (1992). "Structural patterns vs. string patterns for extracting semantic information from dictionaries." In Proceedings, 14th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Nantes, France, 546-552. find
  61. Nirenburg, Sergei; Carbonell, Jaime; Tomita, Masaru; and Goodman, Kenneth (1992). Machine Translation: A Knowledge-Based Approach. San Mateo, California: Morgan Kaufmann. find
  62. Nirenburg, Sergei, and Goodman, Kenneth (1990). "Treatment of meaning in MT systems." In Proceedings, Third International Conference on Theoretical and Methodological Issues in Machine Translation of Natural Languages, Linguistics Research Center, The University of Texas, Austin, Texas, 171-187. find
  63. Nirenburg, Sergei, and Levin, Lori (1989). "Knowledge representation support." Machine Translation 4(1):25-52. find
  64. Nirenburg, Sergei, and Nirenburg, Irene (1988). "A framework for lexical selection in natural language generation." In Proceedings, 12th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Budapest, Hungary, 471-475. find
  65. Nirenburg, Sergei; Raskin, Victor; and Tucker, Allen B. (1987). "The structure of interlingua in translator." In Machine Translation: Theoretical and Methodological Issues, edited by Sergei Nirenburg, 90-113. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. find
  66. Perlmutter, David M. (1983). Studies in Relational Grammar 1. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. find
  67. Proctor, P. (1978). Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English. London: Longman. find
  68. Pustejovsky, James (1987). "On the acquisition of lexical entries: The perceptual origin of thematic relations." In Proceedings, 25th Annual Conference of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Stanford University, Stanford, California, 172-178. find
  69. Pustejovsky, James, and Bergler, Sabine (1987). "The acquisition of conceptual structure for the lexicon." In Proceedings, Sixth Conference of the American Association of Artificial Intelligence, Seattle, Washington, 566-570. find
  70. Pustejovsky, James; Bergler, Sabine; and Anick, Peter (1993). "Lexical semantic techniques for corpus analysis." Computational Linguistics 19(2):331-358. find
  71. Reichenbach, H. (1947). Elements of Symbolic Logic. London: Macmillan. find
  72. Reiter, Ehud (1990). "Generating appropriate natural language object descriptions." Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. find
  73. Sadler, Louisa, and Thompson, Henry S. (1991). "Structural non-correspondence in translation." In Proceedings, Fifth Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Berlin, Germany, 293-298. find our card
  74. Shieber, Stuart M.; van Noord, Gertjan; Moore, Robert C.; and Pereira, Fernando C. N. (1989). "A semantic-head-driven generation algorithm for unification-based formalisms." In Proceedings, 27th Annual Conference of the Association for Computational Linguistics, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, 7-17. find
  75. Shieber, Stuart M.; van Noord, Gertjan; Moore, Robert C.; and Pereira, Fernando C. N. (1990). "Semantic-head-driven generation." Computational Linguistics 16(1). find
  76. Sondheimer, N.; Cumming, S.; and Albano, R. (1990). "How to realize a concept: Lexical selection and the conceptual network in text generation." Machine Translation 5(1):57-78. find
  77. Thurmair, Gregor (1990). "Complex lexical transfer in metal." In Proceedings, Third International Conference on Theoretical and Methodological Issues in Machine Translation of Natural Languages, Linguistics Research Center, The University of Texas, Austin, Texas, 91-107. find
  78. Trujillo, Arturo (1992). "Locations in the machine translation of prepositional phrases." In Proceedings, Fourth International Conference on Theoretical and Methodological Issues in Machine Translation of Natural Languages, Montreal, Canada, 13-20. find
  79. Tsujii, Jun-ichi, and Fujita, Kimikazu (1991). "Lexical transfer based on bilingual signs: Towards interaction during transfer." In Proceedings, European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Berlin, Germany, 275-280. find
  80. Vauquois, Bernard, and Boitet, Christian (1985). "Automated translation at Grenoble University." Computational Linguistics 11(1):28-36. find
  81. Werner, P., and Nirenburg, S. (1988). "A specification language that supports the realization of intersentential anaphora." In Proceedings, AAAI Workshop on Natural Language Generation, Saint Paul, Minnesota. find
  82. Whitelock, Pete (1992). "Shake-and-bake translation." In Proceedings, 14th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Nantes, France, 784-791. find our card
  83. Wilks, Yorick (1973). "An artificial intelligence approach to machine translation." In Computer Models of Thought and Language, edited by Roger C. Schank and K. M. Colby, 114-151. San Francisco: Freeman. find
  84. Zubizarreta, Maria Luisa (1982). "On the relationship of the lexicon to syntax." Doctoral dissertation, Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts. find
  85. Zubizarreta, Maria Luisa (1987). Levels of Representation in the Lexicon and in the Syntax. Dordrecht, Holland: Foris Publications. find

This page in Markdown → https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/dorr-1994-machine-translation-divergences-formal-description/