The Annotation Scheme of English-Chinese Clause Alignment Corpus

The Annotation Scheme of English-Chinese Clause Alignment Corpus Shili Ge Laboratory of Language and Artificial Intelligence, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, Guangzhou, China 510420 geshili@gdufs.edu.cn Xiaoping Lin Center for Linguistics and Applied Linguistics, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, Guangzhou, China 510420 lxpteresa@126.com Rou Song (�) Laboratory of Language and Artificial Intelligence, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, Guangzhou, China 510420 College of Information Science, Beijing Language and Culture University, Beijing 100083 songrou@126.com Abstract A clause complex consists of clauses, which are connected by component sharing relations and logic-semantic relations. Hence, clause-complex level structural transformations in translation are concerned with the expression adjustment of these two types of relations. In this paper, a formal scheme for tagging structural transformations in English-Chinese translation is designed. The annotation scheme include 3 steps operated on two grammatical levels: parsing an English clause complex into constructs and assembling construct translations on the clause complex level; translating constructs independently on the clause level. The assembling step involves 2 opera- tions: performing operation functions and inserting Chinese words. The corpus annotation shows that it is feasible to divide structural transformations in English-Chinese translation into 2 levels. The corpus, which unfolds formally the operations of clause-complex level structural transfor- mations, would help to improve the end-to-end translation of complicated sentences. 1 Introduction The grammatical levels of a natural language include morpheme, word, group/phrase, clause, and clause complex. Units of a higher level are made up of units of a lower level. Therefore, the central task for machine translation is language transformations on each grammatical level between languages. So far, there have been many studies on group/phrasal- and clausal-level structures and structural transforma- tions. However, clause-complex level (CC-level) structures and structural transformations are far less discussed. Halliday and Matthiessen (2004) describes the structures of English clause complex based on the theory of Systemic-Functional Grammar. Wang (2012) carries out an in-depth study on the structures of Chinese complex sentence in comparison with English. Luo (1992) points out that clauses should be considered as the translation unit in English-Chinese translation. These studies are enlightening, but they are limited to theoretical illustrations and discussions. Song and Ge (2015) study clause complex for language engineering. They put forward and demonstrate the PTA (Parsing-Translating-Assembling) model for English-Chinese translation on the CC-level, which is only a tentative idea and has not been tested through corpus annotation. Ge and Song (2020) clarify the concept of Component Sharing, define clause and clause complex based on this concept, and propose the design of the annotation scheme and specification for English-Chinese Clause Alignment Corpus (ECCA Corpus). Yet, the details of the annotation scheme and specification of the ECCA Corpus still need further study and exploration, especially on the structural transformations between English and Chinese clause complexes and their annotation. A clause complex consists of clauses, but many clauses are not connected linearly because there are shared components between them. In order to present the alignment of English and Chinese clauses, it is necessary to show how English and Chinese clauses …

Content truncated to 500 words