Abstract
The interlingua approach to Machine Translation (MT) aims to achieve the translation task in two independent steps. First, the meanings of source language sentences are represented in an intermediate (interlingua) representation. Then, sentences of the target language are generated from those meaning representations. In the generation of the target sentence, determining sentence structures becomes more difficult, especially when the interlingua does not contain any syntactic information. Hence, the sentence structures cannot be transferred exactly from the interlingua representations. In this paper, we present a mapping approach for task- oriented interlingua-based spoken dialogue that transforms an interlingua representation, so-called Interchange Format (IF), into a feature structure (FS) that reflects the syntactic structure of the target Arabic sentence. This approach addresses the handling of the problem of Arabic syntactic structure determination in the interlingua approach. A mapper is developed primarily within the framework of the NESPOLE! (NEgotiating through SPOken Language in E-commerce) multilingual speech-to-speech MT project. The IF-to-Arabic FS mapper is implemented in SICStus Prolog. Examples of Arabic syntactic mapping, using the output from the English analyzer provided by Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), will illustrate how the system works.- Anthology ID:
- 2006.bcs-1.12
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the International Conference on the Challenge of Arabic for NLP/MT
- Month:
- October 23
- Year:
- 2006
- Address:
- London, UK
- Venue:
- BCS
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Note:
- Pages:
- 149–159
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2006.bcs-1.12
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Khaled Shaalan, Azza Abdel Monem, Ahmed Rafea, and Hoda Baraka. 2006. Mapping Interlingua Representations to Feature Structures of Arabic Sentences. In Proceedings of the International Conference on the Challenge of Arabic for NLP/MT, pages 149–159, London, UK.
- Cite (Informal):
- Mapping Interlingua Representations to Feature Structures of Arabic Sentences (Shaalan et al., BCS 2006)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2006.bcs-1.12.pdf