Associating semantic components with intersective Levin classes

This paper examines the question of differences between a traditional interlingua approach and a transferbased approach that uses cross-linguistic semantic features to generalize its transfer lexicon entries, and concludes that the two approaches share a common interest in lexical classifications that can be distinguished by cross-linguistic semantic features. The paper goes on to discuss current approaches to English classification, Levin classes [8] and WordNet [9]. We present a refinement of Levin classes Intersective Classes that shows interesting correlations to WordNet and that makes more explicit the semantic components that serve to distinguish different classes. Tradition holds that an interlingua approach has a deeper analysis than a transfer approach, and that it can serve as a representation for many languages, thus providing for major gains in efficiency. Classic transfer approaches which are more syntactic are more amenable to statistical acquisition methods, but they fail to generalize their treatment of structural divergences. They also require that all possible language pairs be dealt with individually which, while an advantage for language-specific constructions such as idioms, is unnecessarily laborious for more frequently occurring items which exhibit regular syntactic behavior. With the recent lexico-structural approach to transfer lexicons, [10, 11, 1], these approaches are no longer as distinct as traditionally viewed, and are not necessarily antithetical, in that they are both concerned with cross-linguistic semantic components. The lexico-structural approach gains efficiency by recognizing that structural correspondences hold for entire classes of lexical items. For example, a classic problem is the translation of motion verbs from English to French. In English the manner of motion can be incorporated into the matrix verb, with the direction of the motion being adjoined on by a prepositional phrase, as in John swam across the lake. In many cases, this is not allowed in French, where the direction becomes incorporated into the matrix verb, and the manner is adjoined on as an adverbial or a prepositional phrase, as in Jean a traversé le lac à la nage, (Jean crosses the lake by swimming). This type of structural correspondence has been typically handled best by interlingua approaches, since traditional transfer approaches required that every possible combination of manner of motion verb and path prepositional phrase be listed explicitly, and paired with its target language equivalent. The lexico-structural approach allows the entire class of English manner of motion verbs that have adjoined path prepositional phrases, to be associated in a single transfer lexicon entry with the class of French directed motion verbs with adjoined manners of motion. This is effected by treating manner of motion, path and directed motion as cross-linguistic semantic features that occur in both languages, and serve to anchor the correspondences [11]. These are the same basic components that Jackendoff ascribes to change-of-location verbs in his Lexical Conceptual Structures (LCS), GO, PATH and MANNER, [5]. A similar interlingua treatment, also based on LCS, would decompose the English phrase swim across the lake into the same three separate components which would constitute the predicates of the predicate-argument structure. This predicate argument structure, the LCS, then also serves as the representation for the French translation [2]. The new lexico-structural transfer approach is more similar to the interlingua approach in that they