Conceptual Basis of the Lexicon in Machine Translation

Abstract

This report describes the organization and content of lexical information required for the task of machine translation. In particular, the lexical-conceptual basis for UNITRAN, an implemented machine translation system, will be described. UNITRAN uses an underlying form called lexical conceptual structure to perform lexical selection and syntactic realization. Lexical word entries have two levels of description: the first is an underlying lexical-semantic representation that is derived from hierarchically organized primitives, and the second is a mapping from this representation to a corresponding syntactic structure. The interaction of these two levels will be discussed and the lexical selection and syntactic realization processes will be described.