A System for Translating Locative Prepositions From English Into French

A SYSTEM FOR TRANSLATING LOCATIVE PREPOSITIONS FROM ENGLISH INTO FRENCH* Nathalie Japkowicz Department of Computer Science Rutgers University New Brunswick, NJ 08903 nat~yoko.rutgers.edu Janyce M. Wiebe Department of Computer Science University of Toronto Toronto, Canada M5S 1A4 wiebe~cs.toronto.edu Abstract Machine translation of locative prepositions is not straightforward, even between closely re- lated languages. This paper discusses a sys- tem of translation of locative prepositions be- tween English and French. The system is based on the premises that English and French do not always conceptualize objects in the same way, and that this accounts for the major differences in the ways that locative preposi- tions are used in these languages. This paper introduces knowledge representations of con- ceptualizations of objects, and a method for translating prepositions based on these con- ceptual representations. 1 Introduction This paper presents an analysis of the differ- ences in the uses of locative prepositions in two languages, and then describes an auto- matic system of translation that is based on this analysis. Our research originated from the observa- tion that even between two closely related lan- guages such as English and French, locative prepositions of even simple sentences do not seem to be translated from one language to the other in a clearly systematic and coherent way. However, the translation becomes more coherent if we introduce Herskovits' idea of the ideal meaning of a preposition (Herskovits 1986) and Lakoff's idea of Idealized Cognitive Models (ICM's) (Lakoff 1987). A central part of our research was to design entities based *The research described in this paper was con- ducted at the Uxfivez~ity of Toronto. on Lakoff's ICM's. We call these entities cor.- ceptual representations of objects. The main thesis of this paper is that, even though the ideal meanings of the locative prepositions we studied are the same in English and in French, these two languages do not always conceptual- ize the objects involved in s scene in the same way and that this leads to differences in the translation of locative prepositions. This the- ory seems suitable to pairs of languages other than English and French, as well. In addition, we will also desccibe how the system detects abnormalities and ambiguities using knowledge required for the translation task. This paper is organized as follows: section 2 presents an analysis of and a solution to the problem of translating locative prepositions from English into French, section 3 presents the conceptual representations of objects, sec- tion 4 presents the algorithm we designed and implemented for translating locative preposi- tions, section 5 discusses the detection of ab- normalities and ambiguities, and section 6 is the conclusion. 2 Translating Locative Prepositions We now describe the differences between En- glish and French locative expressions and give a possible analysis of the problem. Specifi- cally, we concentrate on the translation of the three locative prepositions 'in', 'on', and 'at', into the French prepositions 'dana', 'surf, and '&', in the context of simple sentences or ex- pressions of the form: 153 (located object)(be)(locative preposition) …

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