Idioms in the Rosetta Machine Translation System

What it is about

The paper addresses idioms such as kick-the-bucket or break-heart, which are several words with one meaning, often scattered over the sentence with a free argument between their parts. Transformational theories handle only some of these, and the author lists sentences where the idiom keeps or loses its reading under passive, clefting and topicalisation. The proposed solution maps the idiom structure onto one basic meaning in the Rosetta isomorphic grammars, so that no structural transfer is needed. Grammar rules then work on idiom structures as they do on ordinary ones, and a few restrictions are written per idiom. The author reports only that a test implementation in Rosetta looked promising; there are no counts.

Ideas

• I1. Multi-token concepts in the meta-world: an idiom becomes one concept whose members are the source words, possibly with gaps. The existing gap pairs of one to four words in meta.rs already find such spans; measure how many idiom spans in the Bible pairs are recovered as one concept.
• I2. A per-concept restriction flag: the paper's rule that a passive blocks the idiom reading becomes a Boolean on the frame in prag, counted from the aligned data, not a grammar rule written by hand.
• I3. Control for the known noise: phrases that carry function words (the open case of unto_thou) should be dropped by a gate. Run the lexicon learner with and without this gate, twice each, and compare the residual.

For Mova

The code is tools/translate/src/meta.rs (lexicon) and the frames of prag. The paper's syntactic account is not for Mova, but its central move, one meaning for a scattered set of words, is what the lexicon learner does from counts. The idea to measure is open problem 2: merges that should be kept only when they lower the bits of the reader and encoder.

Topics: Machine translation

Cite

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

@inproceedings{schenk1986idioms,
  title = {{Idioms in the Rosetta Machine Translation System}},
  author = {Schenk, Andre},
  booktitle = {Coling 1986 Volume 1: The 11th International Conference on Computational Linguistics},
  year = {1986},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/C86-1075/}
}

References

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

1. Boisset, J. (1978), Idioms as Linguistic Convention (with illustrations from French and English), Doct. Diss. (University Microfilms International, 1981). find
2. Chomsky, N. (1981), Lectures on Government and Binding (Foris Publications, Dordreeht). find
3. Fraser, B. (1970), Idioms Within a Transformational Gramnmr, Foundations of Language 6, pp. 22-43° Kayne, R. (1982), Unambiguous Paths, in May, R., and Jo Koster, eds., Levels of Syntactic Representation (Foris, Dordrecht), pp. 143-183o Landsbergen, J° (1982), Machine Translation Based on Logically Isomorphic Montague Grsnmmrs, in Horecky, J.(ed.), COLING 82 (North-Holland), pp. ].75-182o Landsbergen, J° (1984), Isomorphic Grammars and Their Use in the Rosetta Translation System, Paper presented at the Tutorial on Machine Translation~ Lugano, to appear in: King, M., ed., Machine Translation: The State of the Art (Edinburgh University Press)° Montague, Ro (1973), l~e Proper Treatment of Quantification in Modern English, in: Montague (1974), pp. 247-270. find
4. Montague, R. (1974), Formal Philosophy: Selected Papers of Richard Montague, ed. by Richmond Thomason (Yale University Press, New Haven). find
5. Partee, B.H. (1973), Some Transformational Extensions of Montague Grmnmar, Journal of Philosophical Logic 2~ pp. 509-534. Reprinted in Partee, B.H.(ed), Montague Gr~mnmr (Academic Press, New York, 1976), pp. 51-76. find
6. Pesetsky, D. (1985), Morphology and Logical Form, Linguistic Inquiry, Vol. 16, No. 2, Spring, pp. 193-246. find
7. Rothkegel, A. (1973), Idioms in Automatic Language Processing, in: Zampolli, A., and N. Calzolari (eds.), Computational and Mathomatieal Linguistics. Proceedings of the International Conference on Computational Linguistics (Leo S.Olschki Editore, Firenze), pp. 713-728. find
8. Wehrli, E. (1984), A Government-Binding Parser for French, Working Papers No. 48, Institut pour les Etudes Samantiques et Cognitives. (Universit8 de Gen~ve). find

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