Generic Parsing and Hybrid Transfer in Automatic Translation

The ITS-3 project (LATL, University of Geneva) aims at developing an automatic translation system involving French, Italian, English and German. The translation system relies on the classical architecture parsing-transfer-generation. Parsing of the source language is done by the IPS system, which is based on the Principles & Parameters Theory of Chomsky’s Generative Grammar (Chomsky and Lasnik, 1995). The parser produces rich syntactic structures containing lexical, phrasal, grammatical and thematic information, and focuses on (i) robustness, (ii) genericity, and (iii) deep linguistic analyses. These properties are essential for a system to be efficient in multilingual large-scale applications. The transfer mechanism acts on hybrid structures, called pseudo-semantic structures (PSS), that mix lexical items with abstract semantic information. On the basis of these PSS, the generation module produces correct output sentences