Implicit Cues for Explicit Generation: Using Telicity as a Cue for Tense Structure in a Chinese to English MT System

Abstract

n translating from Chinese to English, tense and other temporal information must be inferred from other grammatical and lexical cues. Tense information is crucial to providing accurate and fluent translations into English. Perfective and imperfective grammatical aspect markers can provide cues to temporal structure, but such information is optional in Chinese and is not present in the majority of sentences. We report on a project that assesses the relative contribution of the lexical aspect features of (a)telicity reflected in the Lexical Conceptual Structure of the input text, versus more overt aspectual and adverbial markers of tense, to suggest tense structure in the English translation of a Chinese newspaper corpus. Incorporating this information allows a 20% to 35% boost in the accuracy of tense relization with the best accuracy rate of 92% on a corpus of Chinese articles. (Cross-referenced as UMIACS-TR-2001-33) (Cross-referenced as LAMP-TR-070)