Approximating an Interlingua in a Principled Way

What it is about

The paper gives a method for building the ontology of an interlingua one language at a time. For each language, a taxonomy of the linguistic generalisations needed by its analyser and generator is built first. Then the domain entities are placed in that taxonomy, and the result is merged into the existing interlingua ontology. The guiding criterion is that the ontology must be just powerful enough to draw the distinctions that analysis and generation need in the given domains. A term is added only if it captures a distinct linguistic phenomenon that is not already handled. The authors accept that the ontology will lean toward the languages already folded in, and approach language neutrality asymptotically. The paper is a method description and has no quantitative evaluation.

Ideas

• I1. Apply the just-powerful-enough criterion as a split test in meta.rs. A concept is split only when a context shows two targets that the current residual cannot separate. Count the splits and the residual change for each.
• I2. Measure neutrality by folding. Build the meta-world from English and Hebrew pairs in turn, then add the third Bible translation, and measure how many concepts keep their members. A concept that changes with each added source is a sign of language-specific noise.
• I3. Use the grammatical classes of the Mova grammars as the top levels of the meta-world: countable and uncountable object, and quality or process for modifiers, taken from en/src/morph.rs and the UD features. This gives the number and person features of open problem 5 a place in the taxonomy.

For Mova

The folding procedure is the closest method to the meta-world's merge rule, and the stability measure in I2 can be run on the existing Bible pairs. The code is tools/translate (meta.rs) and the features come from en/src/morph.rs. The paper's criterion is qualitative, so each step needs the residual count before it is accepted.

Topics: Machine translation

Cite

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

@inproceedings{hovy1992approximating,
  title = {{Approximating an Interlingua in a Principled Way}},
  author = {Hovy, Eduard and Nirenburg, Sergei},
  booktitle = {Speech and Natural Language: Proceedings of a Workshop Held at Harriman, New York, February 23-26, 1992},
  year = {1992},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/H92-1052/}
}

References

17 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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