Translation Model with Semantic Capability

Automatic translation systems may be characterized for the most part in one of two ways: (1) Translators in which the language processors are internally dependent on the description of the syntax of the language being processed. (2) Translators externally dependent on the syntax.* Programming a translation system of the first type has two major advantages. It can be set up quicker and it requires less initial technical investment. On the other hand, such a system imposes many operational difficulties on debugging the linguistic description. The second type is better adapted to more flexible linguistics research but is more costly and time-consuming to establish since its concrete results and more sophisticated research power and processing capabilities are not realized for some time after the initial effort. The linguistic descriptive effort which has gone into either of these approaches has tended to concentrate primarily on matters of morphosyntactic analysis, rearrangement and synthesis. Such efforts as have been directed to semantic description in operational translation systems have been limited virtually to ad hoc statements of co-occurrence of particular items. Little else could have been done due, perhaps, to the lack of an adequate theoretic and formalizable notion of semantic process and to the descriptive limitations inherent in processing algorithms developed thus far. In this paper I present an outline of the Linguistics Research System, a stratified linguistic data processing system, and interpret some of its facilities for application to semantic description. The system is of the second type in that the linguistic description is in the form of a phrase