tailieunhanh - Báo cáo khoa học: "A SYSTEM FOR TRANSLATING ENGLISH LOCATIVE INTO PREPOSITIONS FROM FRENCH*"

Machine translation of locative prepositions is not straightforward, even between closely related languages. This paper discusses a system of translation of locative prepositions between English and French. The system is based on the premises that English and French do not always conceptualize objects in the same way, and that this accounts for the major differences in the ways that locative prepositions are used in these languages. This paper introduces knowledge representations of conceptualizations of objects, and a method for translating prepositions based on these conceptual representations. . | A SYSTEM FOR TRANSLATING LOCATIVE PREPOSITIONS FROM ENGLISH INTO FRENCH Nathalie Japkowicz Department of Computer Sãence Rutgers University New Brunswick NJ 08903 nat@ Janyce M. Wiebe Department of Computer Science University of Toronto Toronto Canada M5S 1A4 wiebe@ Abstract Machine translation of locative prepositions is not straightforward even between closely related languages. This paper discusses a system of translation of locative prepositions between English and French. The system is based on the premises that English and French do not always conceptualize objects in the same way and that this accounts for the major differences in the ways that locative prepositions are used in these languages. This paper introduces knowledge representations of conceptualizations of objects and a method for translating prepositions based on these conceptual representations. 1 Introduction This paper presents an analysis of the differences in the uses of locative prepositions in two languages and then describes an automatic system of translation that is based on this analysis. Our research originated from the observation that even between two closely related languages such as English and French locative prepositions of even simple sentences do not seem to be translated from one language to the other in a clearly systematic and coherent way. However the translation becomes more coherent if we introduce Herskovits idea of the ideal meaning of a preposition Herskovits 1986 and Lakoff s idea of Idealized Cognitive Models ICM s Lakoff 1987 . A central part of our research was to design entities based The research described ill this paper was conducted at the University of Toronto. on Lakoff s ICM s. We call these entities conceptual representations of objects. The main thesis of this paper is that even though the ideal meanings of the locative prepositions we studied are the same in English and in French these two languages do not always conceptualize