Disambiguating Verbs with Multiple Meaning in the MT-System of IBM Germany

TheSystem iln glen eral Since The MT-System of IBM Germany has already been described elsewhere [5] [63, we shall confine us to the aspects of the system which are substantial to our problem. The system consists of two linguistically significant parts: a machine lexicon residing on a direct access device and a program package. The machine lexicon contains: I. English words, 2. a code providing grammatical information about each word, 3. German equivalents. In case of more Than one possible German equivalent of an English word, there are-roughly spoken-as many separate lexicon entries in the machine lexicon as German Translations. To put it in a more precise way: for an English homograph, redundant as it may be, there is a separate lexicon entry for each v of its syntactic funtions, i.e. an English word like CHANGE has been entered in the lexicon as a noun CHANGE, with the German translation: KNDERUNG and also as a verb-CHANGE, with the Translation VERXNDERN. The order of entries is fixed. While The machine lexicon provides each English word with one or more German equivalents, the program package operating on the lexicon develops the proper Translation for the English input text. The first step of processing is the lexical assignment, i.e. each English word is looked up in The machine lexicon and its first occurence in The lexicon is Taken as the provisional translation ~ The following steps care for the proper choice of the German equivalents from Those other alternatives provided by the lexicon, which remain accessible throughout the entire subsequent processing. In order to choose the correct equivalent, The programs rely on the original word order of the English input text and the codes which are primarily drawn from the lexicon. Generally it can be said, that as the processing progresses, we have more and more information about The linguistic structures at our disposal, and we can make increasingly subtle decisions. It is obvious that to distinguish between