The Explanatory Combinatorial Dictionary as the Key Tool in Machine Translation

Lexical and syntactic mismatches between languages are the main challenge for every translation (especially formidable for Machine Translation; see Mel’čuk & Wanner 2001, 2006). An example of mismatches in English-to-Russian translation: a. The demonstrators were brutally beaten and tear-gassed by the police. b. Rus. Demonstranty podverglis ́ zverskomu izbieniju so storony policii; protiv nix byl primenën slezotočivyj gaz lit. ‘Demonstrators underwent bestial beating from_side of_police; against them was applied tear-gas’. The only way to resolve inter-linguistic mismatches is paraphrasing—intraor interlinguistic. To explain better what I mean I will refer to mismatches found in the example. Thus, in Russian: — The verb with the meaning ‘[to] tear-gas’ does not exist, so you have to use the semantically equivalent expression ‘[to] apply tear-gas’. — The passive of the verb ‘[to] beat’—with the Actor ‘police’—does not readily combine with the noun ‘police’ as the syntactic Agent (it is not official enough!), so you have to use the semantically equivalent expression ‘[to] undergo a beating’ (with the Subject ‘demonstrators’). — The expression ‘[to] apply tear-gas’ does not have a passive and therefore cannot be directly conjoined with ‘[to] undergo a beating’ (the two clauses have different Subjects), so you have to use loose coordination of two complete clauses. Such paraphrases are described by Deep-Syntactic Paraphrasing System of the Meaning-Text Theory: a few dozens universal paraphrasing rules (Mel’čuk 1992; Milićević 2006). Paraphrasing at the semantic and/or deep-syntactic level can be ensured only by an extremely rich dictionary. Thus, the transformation ‘[to] tear-gas’  ‘[to] apply teargas’ is triggered by the information in the lexical entry of the Russian nominal expression SLEZOTOČIVYJ GAZ ‘tear-gas’ (where the semi-auxiliary verb PRIMENJAT ́ ‘[to] apply’ is found). Such a dictionary, semantically-based and lexical co-occurrence centered, is the Explanatory Combinatorial Dictionary (Mel’čuk & Žolkovskyj 1984, Mel’čuk et al.