Lexical Functions as a Tool of ETAP-3 1
Jurij D. Apresjan, Igor Boguslavsky, Иомдин Леонид Лейбович, Leonid L. Tsinman · 2003
The paper describes the use of lexical functions, an instrument proposed in Igor Melcuk's “Meaning Text Theory” (MTT), in advanced NLP applications as exemplified in the ETAP-3 linguistic processor, including parsers, high quality machine translation (MT), a system of paraphrasing and computer-aided learning of lexica. In parsing, collocate LFs are used to resolve or reduce syntactic and lexical ambiguity. The MT system resorts to LFs to provide idiomatic target language equivalents for source sentences in which both the argument and the value of the same LF are present. The system of paraphrasing, which automatically produces one or several synonymous transforms for a given sentence or phrase, can be used in a number of advanced NLP applications ranging from MT to authoring and text planning. The computer-aided system of learning lexica is also based on the concept of LFs as a tool of formal description of that part of vocabulary which is simultaneously systematic and idiomatic and is therefore most difficult for language acquisition.