Generative Lexicon Principles for MachineTranslation : A Case for Meta - Lexical

This paper addresses two types of mismatches in the translation of reported speech between German and English. The rst mismatch is between the repeated use of the reported speech construction in English and the use of subjunctive in German used to indicate continued attribution. The second mismatch concerns the diierence in usage of metonymic extensions in the subject position of reported speech. Examples show the diierent styles of reporting the utterances of somebody else. A well-structured lexicon is presented as one step to the solution of the problems presented. One key feature of the proposed lexicon is a meta-lexical organization of basic word entries, which is shown to facilitate the translation process. We contrast our notions of lexical structure with diierent recent proposals in machine translation. 1. Motivation One traditional source of information about the world, the newspaper, is adjusting to the need for faster dissemination of news by providing on-line services. There are two tasks: there is too much information, thus information needs to be extracted as much as possible automatically. This problem will not be addressed in this paper and, once solved, might reduce the urgency (but not the need) for the second task, namely making information presented in diierent languages available. This second problem should be attacked as much as possible automatically, as well. Newspaper articles have not found separate discussion to date in computational linguistics, including machine translation. The particular style adhered to in newspaper articles is, however large, a sublanguage. This paper addresses some aspects of newspaper style and the problems this poses for machine translation. The most striking feature of the North American newspaper style is the frequency of the use of reported speech. This style is conventionalized rather than purely functional , as can be seen from the diierent styles observed in diierent countries. We will limit our attention here to English and German. Even for such closely related languages and speakers the diierences are important enough to be considered in detail. The stylistic diierences we will consider in this context are limited to the use of subjunctive and of metonymic extensions. This paper aims to exemplify rather than describe exhaustively the diierent possible styles. The point is to present a well-structured lexicon as one step to the