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Approximating an Interlingua in a Principled Way

E. Hovy,Sergei Nirenburg

Published 1992 in Human Language Technology - The Baltic Perspectiv

ABSTRACT

We address the problem of constructing in a principled way an ontology of terms to be used in an interlingua for machine translation. Given our belief that the a true language-neutral ontology of terms can only be approached asymptotically, the construction method outlined involves a stepwise folding in of one language at a time. This is effected in three steps: first building for each language a taxonomy of the linguistic generalizations required to analyze and generate that language, then organizing the domain entities in terms of that taxonomy, and finally merging the result with the existing interlingua ontology in a well-defined way. This methodology is based not on intuitive grounds about what is and is not 'true' about the world, which is a question of language-independence, but instead on practical concerns, namely what information the analysis and generation programs require in order to perform their tasks, a question of language-neutrality. After each merging is complete, the resulting taxonomy contains, declaratively and explicitly represented, those distinctions required to control the analysis and generation of the linguistic phenomena. The paper is based on current work of the PANGLOSS MT project.

PUBLICATION RECORD

  • Publication year

    1992

  • Venue

    Human Language Technology - The Baltic Perspectiv

  • Publication date

    1992-02-23

  • Fields of study

    Linguistics, Computer Science

  • Identifiers
    DOI 10.3115/1075527.1075588
  • External record

    Open on Semantic Scholar

  • Source metadata

    Semantic Scholar

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