English-Russian-Finnish cross-language comparison of phrasal verb translation equivalents
Olga Mudraya, Scott Piao, Laura Löfberg, Paul Rayson, Dawn Archer · Lancaster EPrints (Lancaster University) · 2005
A phraseological expression in a language may have equivalent expressions in other languages with different morpho-syntactic structures and semantic properties. Our recent experience in the Benedict Project (EU IST-2001-34237), in which a Finnish semantic lexicon compatible to the Lancaster English semantic lexicon (Rayson et al., 2004) has been built, shows that there can exist complex cross-language relations between English phraseological expressions, or multiword expressions (MWE), and their translation equivalents in other languages. A deeper understanding of such relations between phraseological expressions across languages is important for various tasks such as language learning, translation, automatic bilingual/multilingual lexicon extraction, etc. This work forms part of two research projects which involve porting of the Lancaster English semantic tagger (Rayson et al., 2004) to Russian and Finnish languages, as well as the continuing improvement of the English tagger. Previous computational approaches to MWE have mainly focussed on English, and there has been little previous research on computational approaches to MWE in Russian (Sharoff, 2004) or Finnish.