Challenges in adapting an interlingua for bidirectional English-Italian translation

Violetta Cavalli-Sforza, Krzysztof Czuba, Teruko Mitamura, Eric Nyberg


Abstract
We describe our experience in adapting an existing high- quality, interlingual, unidirectional machine translation system to a new domain and bidirectional translation for a new language pair (English and Italian). We focus on the interlingua design changes which were necessary to achieve high quality output in view of the language mismatches between English and Italian. The representation we propose contains features that are interpreted differently, depending on the translation direction. This decision simplified the process of creating the interlingua for individual sentences, and allows the system to defer mapping of language-specific features (such as tense and aspect), which are realized when the target syntactic feature structure is created. We also describe a set of problems we encountered in translating modal verbs, and discuss the representation of modality in our interlingua.
Anthology ID:
2000.amta-papers.17
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fourth Conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas: Technical Papers
Month:
October 10-14
Year:
2000
Address:
Cuernavaca, Mexico
Editor:
John S. White
Venue:
AMTA
SIG:
Publisher:
Springer
Note:
Pages:
169–178
Language:
URL:
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/3-540-39965-8_17
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Violetta Cavalli-Sforza, Krzysztof Czuba, Teruko Mitamura, and Eric Nyberg. 2000. Challenges in adapting an interlingua for bidirectional English-Italian translation. In Proceedings of the Fourth Conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas: Technical Papers, pages 169–178, Cuernavaca, Mexico. Springer.
Cite (Informal):
Challenges in adapting an interlingua for bidirectional English-Italian translation (Cavalli-Sforza et al., AMTA 2000)
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PDF:
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/3-540-39965-8_17