An Investigation into the use of Argument Structure and Lexical Mapping Theory for Machine Translation
Shun Ha Sylvia Wong, Peter Hancox · University of Birmingham Institutional Research Archive (University of Birmingham) · 1998
In recent work on the Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG) formalism, argument structure (a-structure) and lexical mapping theory have been used to explain many linguistic behaviours across languages. It has been suggested that the combination of c-structure, f-structure and a-structure might form a suitable architecture for Universal Grammar. If this suggestion is valid, the LFG formalism would be a suitable linguistic model for Machine Translation (MT). This thesis reports on the investigations carried out on using a-structure and lexical mapping theory for aiding various sub-tasks in MT. The two investigations described in this thesis are the abilities of a-structure and lexical mapping theory to: (1) aid different kinds of lexical and structural disambiguations involving verbs and prepositions, and (2) act as a suitable medium for carrying out source-to-target language transfer. Based on the results of these investigations, this thesis also gives an evaluation of how well a-structure and lexical mapping theory can improve the existing models of linguistic-based MT.