vrsyrotiuk@water.waterloo.edu (Violet Syrotiuk) (03/20/89)
DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE
UNIVERSITY OF WATERLOO
SEMINAR ACTIVITIES
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE SEMINAR
- Thursday, March 23, 1989
Ms. Chrysanne DiMarco, of the Department of Computer
Science at the University of Toronto, will speak on
``Computational Stylistics for Natural Language
Translation''.
TIME: 3:30 PM
ROOM: DC 1304
ABSTRACT
The problem of style is highly relevant to machine
translation (MT), but current systems deal only
superficially with the translation of style. MT output
may be syntactically correct but aims no higher than
being strictly uniform in tone. The expressive effects
contained in the source text, together with the
associated meaning, are lost.
We have chosen a non-literary, group-based, and, most
important, goal-directed view of style. A ``group-
based'' approach aims to discover the stylistic
standards shared by a body of writers, rather than the
characteristics of an individual author. ``Goal-
directed'' means that we seek to explicitly correlate
specific aspects of style such as clarity, abstraction,
and concreteness with particular lexical, syntactic,
and semantic structures.
The foundation of a computational model of goal-
directed stylistics for French-to-English translation
has been designed and is now being implemented.
Syntactic and semantic stylistic grammars have been
constructed and stylistic parsers are being developed.
We believe that the incorporation of stylistic analysis
into MT systems will significantly reduce the current
reliance on human post-editing and improve the quality
of MT output.
--
Violet R. Syrotiuk | vrsyrotiuk@water.uucp
Computer Science Dept. | watmath!water!vrsyrotiuk
University of Waterloo | vrsyrotiuk@water.uwaterloo.ca
Waterloo, ON N2L 3G1 | vrsyrotiuk@water.waterloo.edu (or .cdn)