Translingual grammar induction for conversational systems

Abstract

We propose an induction algorithm to semi-automate grammar authoring in an interlingua-based machine translation framework. This algorithm is designed for restricted domains within the context of multilingual conversational systems. It uses a pre-existing one-way translation system from some other language to the target language as prior information. It then infers a grammar for the target language. We demonstrate the system's effectiveness on a weather domain and on a travel domain. We automatically induced Chinese and French grammars for these domains from their English counterparts, and then showed that they can produce high-quality interlingua to be used in translation.