On the Meaning preservation capacities in Machine Translation

The paper investigates how meaning preservation can be achieved in MT systems. A distinction is made between ontological MT systems and epistemological MT systems. Whereas ontological MT systems perform meaning preservation in the translation process by means of a set of rules that is provided by a system-external world, epistemological MT systems perform an 'understanding' of meaning that is induced through a learning corpus. According to Dum75], theories of meaning can be rich or they can be austere and they can be holistic or molecular. Some approaches to epistemological MT are discussed and classiied according to the terminology introduced. The paper states that "all-purpose" MT is, however, unfeasible. In the MT literature it has often been stated that a translation is valid if and only if the source language text and the target language text have the same meaning. Although this appears intuitively correct, it is unclear what meaning actually is: many people consider meaning as a mental phenomenon. For in-numberable researchers in the eld of computational linguistics and artiicial intelligence meaning is merely a (bracketed) expression that is part of a (meta) language. Some philosophers conceptualize meaning as a compound structure from which parts are in their minds and other parts are in a (physical) world 1. Others see it as an abstract entity that is shared by the members of a (linguistic) society 2 and still others deene the meaning as being dependent on the goals and intentions of the cognitive agent: meaning thus becomes a concept which is relative to an agent's theory (about the world) Sch94]. I do not want to discuss the question of whether the meaning (or parts of it) are in the mind or in the world, rather I will investigate how the meaning preservation requirement is handled in MT systems. I will use the following notations: If a source text source and a target text target are 1 Putnam Put75] deenes meaning as a four dimensional vector containing the 1. syntactic marker 2. semantic marker 3. stereotypes, and 4. the extension of the word. 2 Frege Fre62] diierentiates imagination (Vorstellung), meaning (Sinn) and reference (Bedeutung). Whereas the imagination of a word or sentence is subjective, its meaning is a social phenomenon and the reference is in the world. translations of each other I write T source $ T target. If a source text source and a target text target have an equivalent …