Lexical functions and machine translation
Dirk Heylen, Kerry G. Maxwell, Marc Verhagen · 1994
This paper discusses the lexicographical concept of lexical functions (Mel'~uk and Zolkovsky, 1984) and their potential exploitation in the development of a machine translation lexicon designed to handle collocations.We show how lexical functions can be thought to reflect cross-linguistic meaning concepts for collocational structures and their translational equivalents, and therefore suggest themselves as some kind of languageindependent semantic primitives from which translation strategies can be developed.~ Description of the ProblemCollocations present specific problems in translation, both in human and automatic contexts.If we take the construction heavy smoker in English and attempt to translate it into French and German, we find that a literal translation of heavy yields the wrong result, since the concept expressed by the adjective (something like ' excess:i_ve ' ) is translated by grand (large) in French and stark (strong) in German.We observe then that in some sense the adjectives stark, grand and heavy are equivalent in the collocational context, but that this is of course not typically the case in otber contexts, ef grande boite, starke Schachtel and heavy box, where the adjectives could hardly be viewed as equiwdent.It seems then that adjectives which are not literal translations of one another may share meaning properties specifically in the collocational context.How then can we specify this special equivalence in the machine translation dictionary?The answer seems to lie in addressing the concept which underlies the union of adjective and noun in these three cases, i.e., intensification, and hence establish a single meaning representation tbr the adjectives which can be viewed as an interlingual pivot for translation.Collocations have been studied by computational linguists in different contexts.For instance, there is a substantial body of papers on the extraction of "frequently co-occurring words" from corpora using statistical methods (e.g., (Choueka et al., 1983), (Church andHanks, 1989), (Smadja, 1993) to list only a few).These authors focus on techniques for providing material that can be used in other processing tasks such asx The research rcpmlcd in this paper was undmtaken as the project "Collocations and the Lexicalisation of Semantic Operations" (ET-10/75).Financial contributions weir by the Commission of the European Community, Association Suissetra (Geneva) and Oxford University Press.