Principles and Idiosyncrasies in MT Lexicons

Building Lexicons for Machine Translation

Volume

Papers from the 1993 AAAI Spring Symposium

Contents

In this paper we will investigate the balance between the productive, predictable aspects of language and the non-productive, idiosyncratic aspects of language viewed through the prism of the machine translation application. Specifically, we will look at phenomena that give rise to MT divergences. We will concentrate on three types of divergences involving lexicalization of complex meanings, linking semantic roles to syntactic argument positions and the use of syntactic constructions to express a given meaning.