Identifiering av diskursrefenter vid maskinöversättning från ryska till svenska (Identification of dicourse references in machine translation from Russian to Swedish) [In Swedish]

The problem of tracking discourse referents in the process of machine translation which will be discussed in this paper is a part of my work at SW ETRA (Swedish Computer Translation Research) at the Dept of Linguistics, Lund. The SWETRA-programs, implemented in Prolog and based on a GPSG-inspired formalism called Referent Grammau', abbrevi­ ated RG (Sigurd 1987, 1988), allow translation of a large repertoire of syntactic constructions between Russian, Swedish and English. Currently, the research is concentrated on translation from Russian into Swedish. One of the difRculties arising in the process of translating from a Slavic language into a Germanic one is inserting correct definiteness values in the noun phrases, as e.g. Russian and Polish do not make use of definite­ ness as a regular grammatic category. Generating appropriate definiteness values and their morphological representations in the target language is a very complicated task, as the choice between definite and indefinite NPs depends not only on endophoric (textual), but also on many exophoric (external) factors. The most general rules for use of definite noun phrases in Swedish and in English axe, nevertheless, accessible for implementation in Prolog. Our approach to MT requires tracking discourse referents and the paper will also discuss some problems connected with this approach. 1 Begreppen diskursreferent och koreferens Innan vi presenterar den (prelim inära) a lgoritm en som används i S W E T R A p rogram för a tt identifiera diskursreferenter och vä lja nom inalfrasernas bestäm dh etsvärde, vill vi k ortfa tta t beskriva den d iskursm odell, som proceduren bygger p å o ch försöka defin iera sjä lva b egreppet ” diskursreferent” . In form ellt brukar diskursreferenter karakteriseras som ” saker och fakta som m an talar o m ” , vilket im plicerar en exoforisk (ick e-textu ell) relation — m an refererar till o b je k t i den icke-språkliga verk ligheten. D efin itionen av begrep pet diskursreferent m åste d o ck sam tid igt vara relaterad till texten (d et gäller b l a att ägna uppm ärksam het