The Transfer of Anaphors in Machine Translation
Resource
1992 Joint Conference of Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing (ALLC) and Association for Computers and the Humanities(ACH), Oxford, England(1992.04.05-04.09)
Journal
1992 Joint Conference of Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing and Association for Computers and the Humanities
Pages
-
Date Issued
1992
Date
1992
Author(s)
Abstract
This paper adopts Government-Binding (GB) Theory and some Chinese-specific conditions to explain the various uses of anaphors such as the reflexive, pronoun, PRO, trace, pro and variable in Mandarin Chinese. The Transfer of each anaphor is specified for Chinese-English and English-Chinese machine translation systems. We identify the situations in which the coreferential relationship between an anaphor and its antecedent is useful for transfer. Chinese reflexive is translated according to its function and its antecedent. In some situations, the interpretation of pronouns in English is ambiguous at sentence level, but its Chinese Counterpart has only one reading. One-to-many interpretation in Chinese-English translation may be disambiguated by the readers. However, many-to-one interpretation in English-Chinese translation cannot be treated without pronoun resolution. PRO has direct translation between English and Chinese. For Translating topic-comment Structures and ba-constructions, the moved constituent is taken back from its landing site to its empty site (trace), and then the Structural transfer is done. For relative clauses and bei-constructions, the position occupied by trace in English is still left empty in Chinese. Because variable does not appear in English, the other English anaphors are used during the transfer of Chinese pro and variable. The translation of them should involve the discourse knowledge. © 1992 Oxford University Press.
Description
Oxford, England
Type
conference paper