Lexical Ambiguity in Machine Translation: Expressing Regularities in the Polysemy of Danish Motion Verbs.

Table of contents Acknowledgements

Dansk resume

English Summary

1. Introduction

• 1.1 Preliminaries ............................................................................................................. 8
• 1.2 The aims of the thesis .............................................................................................. 12
• 1.3 Composition of the thesis ........................................................................................ 13
• 1.4 Clarifying notes ....................................................................................................... 14

2 Lexical Disambiguation and Machine Translation

• 2.1 Introduction .............................................................................................................. 15
• 2.2 Basic strategies in machine translation ................................................................... 16
• 2.3 Monolingual disambiguation in machine translation ............................................. 17
• 2.4 Specific problem cases in translation: lexical mismatches and lexical divergences...................................................................................................................... 24
• 2.5 Summary .................................................................................................................. 26

3 Some Influential Approaches to the Treatment of Lexical Ambiguity

• 3.1 Introduction .............................................................................................................. 28
• 3.2 Homonomy and polysemy - some basic considerations on lexical ambiguity........29
• 3.3 Some recent approaches to verb ambiguity ............................................................. 30
• 3.4 Summary .................................................................................................................. 39

4 A Survey of Different Approaches to Motion Verbs

• 4.1 Introduction ............................................................................................................. 40
• 4.1.1 Decompositional approaches to motion verbs...................................................... 41
• 4.1.2 Semantic roles approaches to motion verbs.......................................................... 43
• 4.1.3 Contrastive approaches: typological differences between languages in relation to motion verbs .................................................................................................................. 45
• 4.1.4 Motion verbs from the point of view of unaccusativity and event structure.......47
• 4.1.5 Deictic descriptions of motion verbs ....................................................................51
• 4.1.6 Descriptions of Danish motion verbs ...................................................................52
• 4.2 Summary ................................................................................................................. 57

5 Danish Motion Verbs

• 5.1 Introduction ............................................................................................................ 59
• 5.2 Corpus analysis - crucial for lexicography ........................................................... 60
• 5.2.1 Danish corpora ..................................................................................................... 60
• 5.2.2 Corpus tools for Danish ....................................................................................... 61
• 5.2.3 Corpus analysis in the present work .................................................................... 63
• 5.2.4 Second stage of the corpus work: manual categorisation..................................... 68
• 5.3 An analysis of Danish motion verbs ........................................................................73
• 5.3.1 Delimitation of verbs of interest ......................................................................... 73
• 5.3.2 Definition of the basic apparatus: frame elements, event structure, and noun typing ........................................................................................................................................ 73
• 5.3.3 A taxonomy of Danish motion verbs .................................................................. 80
• 5.3.4 Syntactic alternations of Danish motion verbs ................................................... 89
• 5.3.5 Semantic potential of Danish motion verbs ...................................................... 109
• 5.3.6 Sense selection and distributional tests ............................................................. 118
• 5.3.7 Exceptions to elasticity in meaning ................................................................... 119
• 5.4 Summary ............................................................................................................... 120

6 Formalisation and Implementation

• 6.1 Introduction .......................................................................................................... 122
• 6.2 Formalisation in an HSPG-inspired lexicon ....................................................... 123
• 6.2.1 Standard HPSG and lexical semantics............................................................... 123
• 6.2.2 Conflation of syntactic, semantic and pragmatic information in HPSG.......... 124
• 6.2.3 Frame Semantics in the lexical sign .................................................................. 125
• 6.2.4 The treatment of directionals in the lexical sign .............................................. 126
• 6.2.5 Typing of ARG\_PSOA and FE\_PSOA........................................................... 128
• 6.2.6 A simplistic event structure analysis in the lexical sign.................................... 130
• 6.2.7 Selectional restrictions in the lexical sign ......................................................... 131
• 6.2.8 The lexical sign as a whole.................................................................................. 132
• 6.2.9 Productive devices in the lexicon........................................................................ 133
• 6.2.10 Sense change rules for meaning extension, meaning reduction and co-composition ....................................................................................................................................... 134
• 6.2.11 Blocking of sense change rules ........................................................................ 140
• 6.3 Exploiting Frame Semantics in transfer................................................................ 142
• 6.3.1 Lexical mapping of derived senses..................................................................... 143
• 6.3.2 Head-switching rules of structural transfer for the treatment of PATH-MANNER divergences .................................................................................................................. 145
• 6.4 Sample implementation in LSGRAM-DK written in ALEP ............................. 148
• 6.4.1 Platforms suitable for implementation of our lexicon ...................................... 148
• 6.4.2 Information structure in LSGRAM-DK ........................................................... 150
• 6.4.3 The lexical sign in LSGRAM-DK .................................................................... 151
• 6.4.4 The lexica of morphology and syntax................................................................. 153
• 6.4.5 The semantic lexicon........................................................................................... 155
• 6.4.6 Modifications of the LSGRAM-DK grammar................................................. 166
• 6.4.7 Testing the lexicon in interaction with the grammar......................................... 168
• 6.5 Summary................................................................................................................ 176

7 Conclusions

References

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Bolette Pedersen

Center for Sprogteknologi, Njalsgade 80, DK-2300 Copenhagen S, Denmark