Lexical-Functional Correspondences and Their Use in the System of Machine Translation ETAP-3

ETAP-3 is a system of machine translation consisting of various types of rules and dictionaries. Those dictionaries, being created especially for NLP system, provide for every lexeme not only data about its characteristics as a separate item, but also different types of information about its syntactic and semantic links to other lexemes. The paper shows how the information about certain types of semantic links between lexemes represented in the dictionaries can be used in a machine translation system. The paper deals with correspondences between lexicalfunctional constructions of different types in the Russian and the English languages. Lexical-functional construction is a word-combination consisting of an argument of a lexical function and a value of this lexical function for this argument. The paper describes the cases when a lexical functional construction in one of these languages corresponds to a lexicalfunctional construction in the other language, but lexical functions represented by these two constructions are different. The paper lists different types of correspondences and gives the reasons for their existence. It also shows how the information about these correspondences can be used to improve the work of the linguistic component of the machine translation system ETAP-3. © 2008. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-ncsa/3.0/). Some rights reserved.