Inducing Translation Templates for Example-Based Machine Translation

This paper describes an example-based machine translation (EBMT) system which relays on various knowledge resources. Morphologic analyses abstract the surface forms of the languages to be translated. A shallow syntactic rule formalism is used to percolate features in derivation trees. Translation examples serve the decomposition of the text to be translated and determine the transfer of lexical values into the target language. Translation templates determine the word order of the target language and the type of phrases (e.g. noun phrase, prepositional phase, ...) to be generated in the target language. An induction mechanism generalizes translation templates from translation examples. The paper outlines the basic idea underlying the EBMT system and investigates the possibilities and limits of the translation template induc-