finin@PRC.UNISYS.COM (12/16/88)
AI SEMINAR UNISYS PAOLI RESEARCH CENTER An Active Bilingual Lexicon for Machine Translation Igal Golan IBM Scientific Center Haifa, Israel The work has been carried out as part of a project on machine translation. A prototype capable of translation sentences from English to Hebrew was built and the active bilingual dictionary is part of this prototype. We design and implement a special language in which the differentiation rules which comprise an entry in the bilingual lexicon are stated. Each statement in the set of rules which comprises a given lexical entry defines a correspondence between a syntactic environment (with semantic feature supplements) in the source language and a translation into the target language. The lexicon entries are directly executable by an interpreter written in LISP. The lexicographer can state the lexical facts and the effects they have on processing in terms that are relatively transparent from a linguistic perspective. The available instructions are rather simple and intuitive. The language has enough expressive power to support a variety of requirements for bilingual lexical mapping, while restricting the scope of operations as much as possible, in order to reduce complexity and avoid undesired consequences for other entries or subsystems. The active bilingual lexicon is the only system component which is exposed to users and can serve to linguistically control transfer effects. A unified approach to lexicon creation and maintenance was a design goal as was the means to gradually refine sense specification and the ability to tailor the definitions to specific text domains. Emphasize was placed on strict isolation of the lexical subsystem from other parts of the translation system. 2:00 pm - December 22, 1988 BIC Conference Room Unisys Paoli Research Center Route 252 and Central Ave. Paoli PA 19311 -- non-Unisys visitors who are interested in attending should -- -- send email to finin@prc.unisys.com or call 215-648-7446 --