The Eurotra linguistic specifications

Directorate-General For Translation European Commission

Description

Information technology and telecommunications
Information - Documentation

Sujets

• Information processing
• Linguistics
• Machine translation
• Programming language
• Terminology

Informations

• Publié par: EUROPEAN-COMMISSION
• Nombre de lectures: 13
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

STUDIES IN MACHINE TRANSLATION
AND NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING
Volume 1
THE EUROTRA
LINGUISTIC SPECIFICATIONS
Edited by
C. COPELAND, J. DURAND
S. KRAUWER, Β. MAEGAARD
• Commission of the European Communities Studies in Machine Translation
and Natural Language Processing
Published by:
Office for Official Publications of the
Commission of the European Community Studies in Machine Translation
and Natural Language Processing
MANAGING EDITOR
Erwin Valentini (CEC, Luxembourg)
EDITORIAL BOARD
Jacques Durand (University ofSalford, United Kingdom)
Frank van Eynde (Nationaal Fonds voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek,
België)
Tom C. Gerhardt (CRP-CUICRETA, Luxembourg)
Steven K rauwer (Rijksuniversiteit Utrecht, Nederland)
Bente Maegaard (Københavns Universitet, Danmark)
Karsten Strørup (CEC, Luxembourg)
Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of (he European Communities, 1991
ISSN 1017-6586
Catalogue number: CD-AM-91-OOl-EN-C
© ECSC-EEC-EAEC, Brussels · Luxembourg, 1991
Printed in the FR of Germany PREFACE
For a number of years, the Eurotra Machine Translation project has been mainly
known by a series of papers presented at conferences, short articles in journals or
books, small-scale demonstrations and internal reports leaked out to interested parties.
While in recent years the number of outside publications has risen sharply, as attested
in the bibliographies of the contributions to these volumes, it has been practically im­
possible for external readers and assessors to gain an accurate view of the Research
and Development work done within the confines of the project. The present series
Studies in Machine Translation and Natural Language Processing published under
the auspices of the Commission of the European Communities - is intended to reflect
some of the research results which have been achieved in the last few years within Eu­
rotra which officially ended in December 1990. The series will also cater for work be­
ing done or being planned in the follow-up programmes to Eurotra sponsored by the
Commission in partnership with the EC member states. The formal, linguistic and
computational specifications of the Eurotra system have been defined within succes­
sive versions of the Eurotra Reference Manual and reflected in implementations done
by language groups and official demonstration packages. But the Reference Manual
is not devised for external consumption: it has been written against a background of
assumptions shared by Eurotra co-workers and within a terminology apt to baffle the
uninitiated. Internal reports usually suffer from the same inevitable parochialism. As
a result, a great deal of the work done by all researchers in the Eurotra project runs the
risk of oblivion.
We hope that the present series will fill in this gap and offer an all-round view of the
research being carried out within the project and its follow-up.
The first two volumes, which must be read in close conjunction, are conceived as
background publications which give a description of the 'official' Eurotra system.
What is presented here is the basis of the development work and applied research done
by language groups roughly during the period 1988-1990. In Volume 1, entitled The
Eurotra Linguistic Specifications, the reader will first of all find a general introduction
to the Eurotra Programme by Bente Maegaard and Sergei Perschke. This first chapter
aims at giving a brief overview of the main goals of the Eurotra project and outlines
some of the salient characteristics of the Eurotra system. This introductory chapter is
followed by a fairly detailed article on thea Linguistic Specifications by Valerio
Allegranza, Paul Bennett, Jacques Durand, Frank van Eynde, Lee Humphreys, Paul
Schmidt and Erich Steiner. Two further articles complete Volume 1 - viz. a general
presentation of the Structure of Dictionaries in Eurotra by Pius ten Hacken, Bente
Maegaard and Heinz-Dieter Maas and a brief overview of Terminology in the project
by Jennifer Pearson and Dorothy Kenny.
Volume 2 offers a presentation of the Eurotra formal specifications. The first con­
tribution is a presentation of the Eurotra Virtual Machine by Annelise Bech. The fol­
lowing article by Giovanni Malnati and Patrizia Paggio surveys the main features of
the user language. In the third and final contribution making up this second volume,
Roberto Cencioni offers a broad overview of the Eurotra software environment. It should be made abundantly clear that Volume 2. in particular, is not necessarily in­
tended to be read from cover to cover by the reader. Apart from their intrinsic interest,
the articles in Volume 2 provide a formal notation within which most other articles in
Volume 1 and in a number of forthcoming volumes are couched. Piecemeal introduc­
tion of fragments of notation by each contributor would have lead to much duplication
and not allowed the reader to have an overall view of the formal machinery used in the
Eurotra project. We therefore hope that readers will be willing to familiarize them­
selves with enough of this material to feel reasonably at ease with Volume 1 as well
as forthcoming volumes in the series.
The editors of these first two volumes are Charles Copeland, Jacques Durand, Ste­
ven Krauwer and Bente Maegaard.
A number of volumes are being planned on themes as varied as the assessment of
computational linguistic formalisms, interlevel processing, morphology, support
verbs and noun argument structure. The editorial board hopes that Studies in Machine
Translation and Natural Language Processing will constitute a bridge between the
Eurotra programme and the computational linguistics community. Vol. 1
THE EUROTRA
LINGUISTIC SPECIFICATIONS
EDITORS
Charles Copeland
Jacques Durand
Steven Krauwer
Bente Maegaard
CONTENTS
BENTE MAEGAARD, SERGEI PERSCHKE
An Introduction to the Eurotra Programme 7
VALERIO ALLEGRANZA, PAUL BENNETT,
JACQUES DURAND, FRANK VAN EYNDE,
LEE HUMPHREYS, PAUL SCHMIDT, ERICH STEINER
Linguistics for Machine Translation: The Eurotra Linguistic Specifications 15
PIUS TEN HACKEN, HEINZ-DIETER MAAS, BENTE MAEGAARD
Dictionaries in Eurotra 125
JENNIFER PEARSON, DOROTHY KENNY
Terminology in Eurotra 161 BENTE MAEGAARD , SERGEI PERSCHKE
An Introduction to the Eurotra Programme
Abstract
In this paper we describe the history of Eurotra, touch briefly upon organisational
aspects, and give an account of the general system philosophy.
1. History and the Goals of Eurotra
Machine translation has roots several hundred years back in the history of mankind:
already Descartes noticed that the same words or concepts existed in the languages he
knew and he introduced the notion of a mechanical dictionary, containing equivalents
in several languages. In our own century the Russian Troyanskij took out a patent on
mechanical translation in 1933. But of course machine translation proper became a re­
ality only after the introduction of computers. The first system was demonstrated in
Georgetown in 1954, and one of its successors, SYSTRAN, was purchased by the
Commission of the European Community in 1976. As a follow-up to this purchase
came the decision to start a European research and development programme in ma­
chine translation, Eurotra. This decision was made in 1982 by the Council of the Eu­
ropean Community.
The goal of the Eurotra programme can be described along two axes: the develop­
ment of a pre-industrial scientific prototype system for machine translation, and the
creation of a widespread European know-how.
Machine translation as a research enterprise, and in particular as a development en­
terprise, has been highly controversial ever since the fifties and sixties. It was stated
in the ALP AC report (1966) that high quality machine translation was not possible,
and would not be possible many years to come. Even if state-of-the-art has changed
considerably over the past 20 years, it is still true that no general purpose machine
translation system has been developed which can produce high quality translations.
The ALPAC report suggested that efforts should go into research in natural lan­
guage processing, rather than into development of machine translation systems, and
this advice was actually followed for some time, increasing the knowledge about nat­
ural language processing, and thereby improving the basis for e.g. machine transla­
tion. Consequently there was in 1982 a basis for suggesting the creation of a research
and development machine translation programme within the European Community
(EC). The programme aims at the creation of a pre-industrial prototype of advanced
design, covering all the official working languages of the Community. This objective 8 Studies in MT and NLP , \ olume I
is very ambitious, if only because it interprets the notion "advanced design" bolli in
terms of the underlying linguistics and of the system architecture.
The reasons that Eurotra was designed not as a pure research programme, but also
as a development programme, are first of all that the development part is there to prove
t