Eckhard Bick - VISL

processors used by translators or language students. In order to achieve full running
machine translation, however, translating base forms obviously isn’t enough. I have
therefore written two additional programs, permut and danmorf, that handle the
generation of (Danish) TL syntax and TL morphology, respectively. From a
performative point of view, permut is not too different from a CG system, since it (a)
is compiled from a set of context sensitive grammatical rules, and (b) works by
string manipulation, treating sentences as word-&-tag strings. The difference is that
permut, unlike a CG, not only removes and adds information, but also replaces
information and - primarily - changes the order of words, groups and clauses - in
some cases even that of morphemes. Permut handles things like complex tenses, NPagreement,
enclitic articles and pronouns, incorporated (elliptic) pronouns and
pronoun anaphora, group-clause and clause-group conversion, reflexivity removal
and addition, prepositional “case”, incorporating verbs, main- and subclause word
order etc. Danmorf takes as input translated base forms (from trad and the
translation mapping CG) as well as attached word class and inflexional information
(modified by permut), and generates (Danish) target language word forms in the
order specified by permut. To this end, danmorf integrates a Danish base form
lexicon with PoS and inflexion class information.
Even without the use of the CG translation mapping module (i.e. only using
the valency and semantic feature instantiation performed by trad), permut and
danmorf can turn the parser’s Portuguese output into intelligible running Danish
text:
(1) live, CG based, machine translation
Though the system's present MT is often fairly crude for longer sentences, this is due
to the fact that the semantic rule body is still quite small in comparison with the
parser’s morphological and syntactic disambiguation rules. Long term, MT
perspectives seem promising, and in principle, the system can be made to handle all
kinds of semantic and structural distinctions, provided that the necessary CG rules
are added for mapping and feature instantiation.
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