Resolving Translation Mismatches With Information Flow

Resolving Translation Mismatches With Information Flow Megumi Kameyama, Ryo Ochitani, Stanley Peters The Center for the Study of Language and Information Ventura Hall, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305 ABSTRACT Languages differ in the concepts and real-world en- tities for which they have words and grammatical constructs. Therefore translation must sometimes be a matter of approximating the meaning of a source language text rather than finding an exact counterpart in the target language. We propose a translation framework based on Situation Theory. The basic ingredients are an information lattice, a representation scheme for utterances embedded in contexts, and a mismatch resolution scheme defined in terms of information flow. We motivate our ap- proach with examples of translation between En- glish and Japanese. 1 Introduction The focus of machine translation (MT) technol- ogy has been on the translation of sentence struc- tures out of context. This is doomed to limited quality and generality since the grammars of un- like languages often require different kinds of con- textual information. Translation between English and Japanese is a dramatic one. The definiteness and number information required in English gram- mar is mostly lacking in Japanese, whereas the hon- orificity and speaker's perspectivity information re- quired in Japanese grammar is mostly lacking in English. There are fundamental discrepancies in the extent and types of information that the gram- mars of these languages choose to encode. An MT system needs to reason about the context of utterance. It should make adequate assumptions when the information required by the target lan- guage grammar is only implicit in the source lan- guage. It should recognize a particular discrepancy between the two grammars, and systematically re- act to the needs of the target language. We propose a general reasoning-based model for handling translation mismatches. Implicit informa- tion is assumed only when required by the target language grammar, and only when the source lan- guage text allows it in the given context. Transla- tion is thus viewed as a chain of reactive reasoning *Linguistic Systems, Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd. between the source and target languages. 1 An MT system under this view needs: (a) a uni- form representation of the context and content of utterances in discourse across languages, (b) a set of well-defined reasoning processes within and across languages based on the above uniform representa- tion, and (c) a general treatment of translation mis- matches. In this paper, we propose a framework based on Situation Theory (Barwise and Perry 1983). First we will define the problem of translation mismatches, the key translation problem in our view. Second we will define the situated representation of an utter- mace. Third we will define our treatment of transla- tion mismatches as a flow of information (Barwise and Etchemendy 1990). At the end, we will discuss a translation example. 2 What is a translation mismatch? Consider a simple bilingual text: EXAMPLE I: BLOCKS (an AI problem) EWGLISH: Consider the blocks world wiCh three blocks, A, B, and C. The blocks A and B are on …

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