Development of Interlingual Lexical Conceptual Structures with Syntactic Markers for Machine Translation

Abstract

This document reports on research conducted at the University of Maryland for the Korean/English Machine Translation (MT) project. Our primary objective was to develop an interlingual representation based on lexical conceptual structure (LCS) and to examine the relation between this representation and a set of linguistically motivated semantic classes. We view the work of the past year as a critical step toward achieving our goal of building a generator: the classification of LCS's into a semantic hierarchy provides a systematic mapping between semantic knowledge about verbs and their surface syntactic structures.

We have focused on several areas in support of our objectives: (1) investigation of morphological structure including distinctions between Korean and English; (2) porting a fast, message-passing parser to Korean (and to the IBM PC); (3) study of free word order and development of the associated processing algorithm; (4) investigation of the aspectual dimension as it impacts morphology, syntax, and lexical semantics; (5) investigation of the relation between semantic classes and syntactic structure; (6) development of theta-role and lexical-semantic templates through lexical acquisition techniques; (7) definition a mapping between KR concepts and interlingual representations; (8) formalization of the lexical conceptual structure (Also cross-referenced as UMIACS-TR-95-16)