An Adaptation of Lexical Conceptual Structure to Multilingual Processing in an Existing Text Understanding System

The extension of an existing text understanding system to multilingual translation using an interlingual approach prompted the search for a language-independent means of expressing predicates and predicate relations. The approach adopted was Lexical Conceptual Structure (LCS), as put forth by [2, 3] and [1]. LCS incorporates notions of event structure, argument relations, and core meaning into a concise language-independent formalism that preserves structure at the same time that it allows for divergences among languages. The task of installing LCS proved simple and straightforward, given the text understanding system's explicit representation of sentential content and capability of indexing the analyzed constituents of the sentence to the appropriate slots in the LCS.