Verb Semantics for English-Chinese Translation

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dc.contributor.authorPalmer, Martha S
dc.contributor.authorPalmer, Martha S
dc.contributor.authorWu, Zhibiao
dc.date2023-05-16T23:49:43.000
dc.date.accessioned2023-05-22T19:57:37Z
dc.date.available2023-05-22T19:57:37Z
dc.date.issued1995-09-01
dc.date.submitted2006-09-08T08:50:14-07:00
dc.description.abstractA common practice in operational Machine Translation (MT) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems is to assume that a verb has a fixed number of senses and rely on a precompiled lexicon to achieve large coverage. This paper demonstrates that this assumption is too weak to cope with the similar problems of lexical divergences between languages and unexpected uses of words that give rise to cases outside of the precompiled lexicon coverage. We first examine the lexical divergences between English verbs and Chinese verbs. We then focus on a specic lexical selection problem - translating English change-of-state verbs into Chinese verb compounds. We show that an accurate translation depends not only on information about the participants, but also on contextual information. Therefore, selectional restrictions on verb arguments lack the necessary power for accurate lexical selection. Second, we examine verb representation theories and practices in MT systems and show that under the fixed sense assumption, the existing representation schemes are not adequate for handling these lexical divergences and extending existing verb senses to unexpected usages. We then propose a method of verb representation based on conceptual lattices which allows the similarities among different verbs in different languages to be quantitatively measured. A prototype system UNICON implements this theory and performs more accurate MT lexical selection for our chosen set of verbs. An additional lexical module for UNICON is also provided that handles sense extension.
dc.description.commentsUniversity of Pennsylvania Institute for Research in Cognitive Science Technical Report No. IRCS-95-22.
dc.identifier.urihttps://repository.upenn.edu/handle/20.500.14332/37547
dc.legacy.articleid1138
dc.legacy.fulltexturlhttps://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1138&context=ircs_reports&unstamped=1
dc.source.issue133
dc.source.journalIRCS Technical Reports Series
dc.source.statuspublished
dc.subject.otherVerb semantics
dc.subject.otherlexical divergences
dc.subject.otherlexical organization
dc.titleVerb Semantics for English-Chinese Translation
dc.typeReport
digcom.contributor.authorisAuthorOfPublication|email:mpalmer@cis.upenn.edu|institution:University of Pennsylvania|Palmer, Martha S
digcom.contributor.authorWu, Zhibiao
digcom.identifierircs_reports/133
digcom.identifier.contextkey203373
digcom.identifier.submissionpathircs_reports/133
digcom.typereport
dspace.entity.typePublication
relation.isAuthorOfPublicationd1611a5b-a3f6-4a2e-b089-fe71b888375c
relation.isAuthorOfPublication.latestForDiscoveryd1611a5b-a3f6-4a2e-b089-fe71b888375c
upenn.schoolDepartmentCenterIRCS Technical Reports Series
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