Conceptual Annotations Preserve Structure Across Translations: A French-English Case Study
Elior Sulem, Omri Abend, Ari Rappoport · 2015
Divergence of syntactic structures between languages constitutes a major challenge in using linguistic structure in Machine Translation (MT) systems.Here, we examine the potential of semantic structures.While semantic annotation is appealing as a source of cross-linguistically stable structures, little has been accomplished in demonstrating this stability through a detailed corpus study.In this paper, we experiment with the UCCA conceptual-cognitive annotation scheme in an English-French case study.First, we show that UCCA can be used to annotate French, through a systematic type-level analysis of the major French grammatical phenomena.Second, we annotate a parallel English-French corpus with UCCA, and quantify the similarity of the structures on both sides.Results show a high degree of stability across translations, supporting the usage of semantic annotations over syntactic ones in structure-aware MT systems.