Enriching Lexical Transfer With Cross-Linguistic Semantic Features or How to Do Interlingua without Interlingua

In this paper, we propose an alternative to interlingua which can capture the analyses and generalizations that interlinguas can express, but which uses cross-linguistic semantic features rather than a separate level of representation. This alternative we call lexico-structural transfer. Lexico-structural transfer relies on the expressive power of a lexicalized syntactic representation (or “lexicalized grammar” for short). In a lexicalized grammar, lexemes are associated with syntactic structure; in the transfer lexicon, we do not simply relate words (or context-free rewrite rules) from one language to words (or context-free rewrite rules) from another language. Instead, we relate lexemes along with relevant syntactic structure (essentially, their syntactic projection along with syntactic and lexical-semantic features). Several different lexicalized grammar formalisms have been proposed in the past, including notably Tree Adjoining Grammar (Joshi, 1987), Lexical-Functional Grammar (Kaplan and Bresnan, 1982) and various dependency grammars. We will present our work using a transfer formalism based on a dependency grammar, namely Mel’čuk’s Meaning Text Theory (MTT) (Mel’čuk, 1988), specifically the “Deep Syntactic Level”. This level of representation is similar in crucial respects to the derivation structures of TAG (Rambow and Joshi, 1996) and to the f-structure of LFG. There are two main reasons why we may want to investigate an alternative to the use of an interlingua: