Efficient Language Independent Generation from Lexical Conceptual Structures
Efficient Language Independent Generation from Lexical Conceptual Structures
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Date
2001-09-05
Authors
Habash, Nizar
Dorr, Bonnie
Traum, David
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Abstract
This paper describes a system for generating natural-language
sentences from an interlingual representation, Lexical Conceptual
Structure (LCS). The system has been developed as part of a
Chinese-English Machine Translation system; however, it is designed to
be used for many other MT language pairs and Natural Language
applications. The contributions of this work include: (1) Development
of a language-independent generation system that maximizes efficiency
through the use of a hybrid rule-based/statistical module; (2)
Enhancements to an interlingual representation and associated
algorithms for interpretation of multiply ambiguous input sentences;(3) Development of an efficient reusable language-independent
linearization module with a grammar description language that can be
used with other systems; (4) Improvements to an earlier algorithm for
hierarchically mapping thematic roles to surface positions; (5)
Development of a diagnostic tool for lexicon coverage and correctness
and use of the tool for verification of English, Spanish, and Chinese
lexicons. An evaluation of translation quality shows comparable
performance with a commercial translation system. The generation
system can also be straightforwardly extended to other languages and
this is demonstrated and evaluated for Spanish.
Cross-referenced as UMIACS-TR-2001-43