Publisher's Synopsis
This book describes a novel, cross-linguistic approach to machine translation that solves certain classes of syntactic and lexical divergences by means of a lexical conceptual structure that can be composed and decomposed in language-specific ways. This approach allows the translator to operate uniformly across many languages, while still accounting for knowledge that is specific to each language.;The translation model can be used to map a source-language sentence to a target-language sentence in a principled fashion. It is built on the basis of a parametric approach, making it easy to change from one language to another (by setting syntactic switches for each language and providing lexical descriptions for each language) without having to write a whole new processor for each language.;Dorr's approach advances the field of machine translation in a number of important ways: it provides a uniform processor in which the same syntactic and lexical-semantic processing modules are used for each language; it is interlingual, able to derive an underlying language-independent from of the source language that allows any of the three target languages - Spanish, English, and German - to be produced from this form; and it describes a systematic mapping between the lexical-semantic level and the syntactic level that allows the appropriate target-language words to be selected and realized, despite the potential for syntactic and lexical divergences.
