Design of LMT: A Prolog-Based Machine Translation System

What it is about

A design paper for LMT, an experimental English-to-German translation system written in Prolog. The English analysis uses Modular Logic Grammar, in which syntax, lexicon and semantics are separate modules, and the grammar is written without any reference to translation. Analysis trees carry grammatical relations, and semantic type checks run during analysis and transfer. Transfer is a syntax-to-syntax step that uses logical variables and unification, working left to right and top down. A single lexicon holds both source information and transfer information, compiled from a compact external format with defaults. German generation is a set of tree transformations on the surface structure. The text read does not give an evaluation table, so the card reports design only.

Ideas

• I1. One lexicon, two views: keep, per concept, the source-side facts (tag, frame, feature) and the target-side facts in one entry, and let a compile step derive the reader's and the encoder's tables from it. The two sides then cannot drift apart, which is the residual problem the translator already has with separate tables.
• I2. Type checks that explain themselves: give each concept a small type (animate, locative, time) and check the meta-world at read time. Every violated check is logged with the verse, the concept and the type, so a failure can be read as a reason.
• I3. Generation as counted transformations: write the word-order rules for the target as ordered tree transformations in en/src/lin.rs, and record how many times each rule fires per sentence, so a rule that never fires is visible.
• I4. Grammar without target knowledge: tools/roundtrip analysis should not depend on the target. Test it by running the English analysis on the same sentences for two target stubs and checking that the trees are identical.

For Mova

The most direct link is the single lexicon with transfer information, which the interlingua lexicon in tools/translate/src/meta.rs lacks. The type checks suit prag and the world, where a violation should say why it happened. The grammar-independence test is a cheap control for the claim that the analysis is shared across targets.

Topics: Machine translation

Cite

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

@article{mccord1989design,
  title = {{Design of LMT: A Prolog-Based Machine Translation System}},
  author = {McCord, Michael C.},
  journal = {Computational Linguistics},
  year = {1989},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/J89-1003/}
}

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