Design of a Machine Translation System for a Sublanguage

DESIGN OF A MACHINE TRANSLATION SYST~4 FOR A SUBIASK~A(~ Beat Bu~, Susan Warwick, Patrick Shann Dalle Molle Institute for Semantic and Cognitive Studies University of Geneva Switzerland ABSTRACT This paper describes the design of a prototype machine translation system for a sublanguage of job advertis~nents. The design is based on the hy- pothesis that specialized linguistic subsystems may require special crmputational treatment and that therefore a relatively shallow analysis of the text may be sufficient for automatic translation of the sublanguage. This hypothesis and the desire to mi- nimize computation in the transfer phase has led to the adoption of a flat tree representation of the linguistic data. 1. INTRODUCTION The most prcraising results in computational linguistics and specifically in Machine Translation (MT) have been obtained where applications were limited to languages for special purposes and to restricted text types (Kittredge, Lehrberger, 1982). In light of these prospects, the prototype MT sys- tem described below I should be seen as an experi- ment in the ecnputational trea~nent of a particular sublanguage. The project is meant to serve both as a didactic tool and as a vehicle for research in MT. The development of a large-scale operational system is not envisaged at present. The following research objectives have been defined for this project: - to establish linguistic specifications of the sublanguage as a basis for automatic processing; - to develop translation algorithms tailored to a cc~putational treatment of the sublanguage. The emphasis of the research lies in defining the depth of linguistic analysis necessary to ade- quately treat the ccrmplexity of the text type with a view to acceptable machine translation. It is the conjecture of our research group that, within the particular sublanguage defined by our corpus, ac- ceptable translation does not necessarily depend on standard linguistic structural analysis but can be obtained with a relatively shallow analysis. Thus, as a working hypothesis, the principle of 'flat trees' has been adopted for the representation of the linguistic data. Flat trees, as opposed to deep trees, only partially reflect the dependency strucn. 1 Project sponsored by the Swiss government. ture obtained by a traditional IC-analysis. The adoption of flat trees goes hand in hand with the further hypothesis that the sublanguage can be translated mechanically with only minimal semm~tic analysis similarly to the TAUM-M~'I%0 system (Chevalier, et al., 1978). 2. THE SUBLAN(ETAGE The corpus is taken from a weekly publication by the Swiss goverrm~nt announcing federal job openings. The wordload of this publication amounts to ca. I0,000 words per week; however, many of the advertisements are carried for several weeks. All job adds are published in the three national lan- guages: German, French and Italian, with German usually serving as the source language (SL), French and Italian as the target language (TL). The study is hence based on a collection of texts already translated by human translators. The ads are grouped according to profession, e.g. academic, technical, administrative, etc. At present, the corpus is limited to the domain of administrative positions, …

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