Visualization Of Protocols Of The Parsing And Semantic Interpretation Steps In A Machine Translation System

In this paper, we describe a tool for the visualization of process protocols produced by the parsing and semantic interpretation modules in a complex machine translation system. These protocols tend to reach considerable sizes, and error tracking in them is tedious and timeconsuming. We show how the data in the protocols can be made more easily accessible by extracting a procedural trace, by splitting the protocols into a collection of cross-linked hypertext files, by indexing the files, and by using simple text formatting and sorting of structural elements. 1 I n t r o d u c t i o n The tool described in this paper was developed in connection with the Gazelle Machine Translation System (Knight et al., 1995), which is currently under development at the USC Information Sciences Institute. At the moment, Gazelle covers machine translation from Japanese and Arabic to English. Figure 1 sketches the flow of processing. The input text is first segmented and tagged with morphological information. It is then parsed and interpreted semantically. The result of semantic interpretation is finally fed into the text generation module. Almost all modules relevant to the discussion here employ bottom up chart parsing mechanisms. For any given input, they may return more than one interpretation, as the sample parse sequence for the string saw the ape with his binoculars in Figure 2 illustrates. The processes of parsing and semantic interpretation are recorded step by step in process protocols. A parse step in our system is equivalent to the creation of a new parse node. Each node receives a category label which determines I Text Submission I