On the Sentence Category Transfer of Action-effect Sentences in Chinese-English Machine Translation

On the Sentence Category Transfer of Action-effect Sentences in Chinese-English Machine Translation Keliang ZHANG Language Knowledge Processing Lab Institute of Acoustics, Chinese Academy of Sciences No.21 West Beisihuan Rd., Beijing 100080, China Idiang99@sina.com Abstract Of the 57 basic sentence categories (SC) defined in the HNC theory, action-effect SC is an important one with distinctive features. In the light of the HNC conceptual network, action-effect sentences in the Chinese language arise directly from causative verbs and compelling verbs, and indirectly from general acting verbs, i.e. via the use of the " de(4)" construction. In Chinese-English machine translation, action-effect sentences follow different SC and SF (sentence format) transfer rules. Therefore, different transfer frames should be adopted so as to ensure the generation of TL sentences with proper syntactico-semantic structures. Experiments show that the rules underlying the SC-SF transfer of action-effect sentences from Chinese to English can cover 90.3% of all the sentences in question. 1� Introduction The HNC (short for Hierarchical Network of Concepts) theory (Huang, 1998) put forward the idea of action-effect chain (AEC), which is composed of the following six links: action (X), process (P), transfer (T), effect (Y), relation (R) and state (5). It advocates that AEC can be used to reflect the maximum commonness of the world and to depict the fundamental laws underlying the existence and development of everything in the universe (Huang, 1998:29). Besides AEC, HNC expounds human thinking via the concept of judgment (D). As judgment is a kind of response made by the rational subjective world to the objective world and the emotional subjective world, judgment and AEC combine to describe the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity, between rationality and emotionality (Zhang Keliang, 2002). AEC+judgment can be called "the generalized action-effect chain" (GAEC), which serves as the basis both for the classification of principal primitive concepts (which constitute one of the eight HNC semantic networks) and for the semantic categorization of sentences. The semantic category of sentences is referred to in the HNC theory as sentence category (SC). The HNC SC system includes 57 basic SCs and, in theory, 3192 composite SCs and over 10 millions of compound SCs (Huang, 2001). Basic SCs are those that have no more than one eigen chunk (EK) which depicts just one of the seven links of GAEC ^. Composite SCs have only one EK, but their EK originates from the semantic blending of the EKs of basic SCs and depicts two or more of the links of GAEC. As to compound SCs, they come from the compounding of basic SCs and/or composite SCs, with two or more EKs that contain information related to corresponding links of GAEC. The 57 basic SCs fall into 7 main types: action, effect, process, transfer, relation, state and judgment. This paper focuses on a special subtype of action SC, i.e. action-effect SC, and investigates the rules underlying the SC transfer of sentences of this sort from Chinese to English. By this study we expect to gain some insights into the relationship between …

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