"Translation Great Problem" - On The Problem Of Inserting Articles When Translating From Russian Into Swedish

The problem to be discussed here i.e. how to generate exponents of a morphosyntactic feature which is systematically used in the target hmguage, but not in the source hmguage is ch)sely related to the development of SWETRA a multilanguage MT system for translating between fragments of Russian, Swedish, English and German (Sigurd & Gawrof f ska -Werngren , 1988). Anyone working on translation between Russian and Germanic languages must face difficulties as Russian NPs do not have either indefinite or definite articles. The solutions proposed here have been implemented in the SWETRA program, which is based on a functional GPSG formalism called Referent Grammar (RG; Sigurd 1987). RG-rewriting rules, implemented in Definite Clause Grammar, are used both for analysis and synthesis. The result of parsing is a socalled functional representation (f-representation), containing descriptions of the constituents and information about their syntactic functions. An f-representation of a simple transitive sentence like "a boy met a girl" looks like this: s(subj(np(r(_,m(boy,sg),indef, sg . . . . ), Attrl,Relcll)) pred(m(meet,past)), obj(np(r(_,m(girl,sg),indef, sg . . . . . . ) Attr2,Relcl2)), sadvl([]),sadvl([]),advl([]), advl([]),advl([])). The entity with the functor r, called "referent nucleus", is a description of the head noun. Slots Attrl/Attr2 and RelcllRelcl2 are used, respectively, for storing possible attributes and relative clauses. Given an instantiated f-representation, the program can generate the target equivalent of the input string according to target-specific rules. But if a certain value required in the target language (as definiteness in Swedish and English) is unspecified in the source language (as definiteness in Russian), the information stored in the f-representation may be insufficient for generating a grammatically correct output (although the output may be comprehensible). So there is a need of an intermediate (transfer) stage between analysis and synthesis. The most probable definiteness values must be derived from the context before the target rules for marking definiteness start to work. Since the notions of reference and coreference are crucial when choosing definiteness values, this intermediate stage will be called "referent tracking". A prel iminary discourse model for referent tracking Informally, discourse referents are often defined as "things the sender is talking about". Referring means primarily pointing out objects and facts in the external world, but we have also to pay attention to those linguistic factors which enable identifying two or more phrases as co-referential. Obviously, two co-referential words or strings of words do not have to point out a physically existing thing: they may allude