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On expressing metonymic relations in multiple languages

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Machine Translation

Abstract

Recently, the scientific interest in addressing metonymy phenomena from a computational perspective has increased significantly. Considerable effort is invested in this, but issues addressing metonymy in the context of natural language generation have been widely ignored so far, and also comparable multilingual analyses are rather sparse. Motivated by these shortcomings, we investigate methods for representing knowledge required to express metonymic relations in several ways and in multiple languages, and we present techniques for generating these alternative verbalizations. In particular, we demonstrate how mapping schemata that enable lexical expressions on the basis of conceptual specifications to be built are derived from the Qualia Structure of Pustejovsky's Generative Lexicon. Moreover, our enterprise has led to the exposition of interesting cross-language differences, notably the use of prefixed verbs and compound nouns in German, as opposed to widely equivalent expressions entailing implicit metonymic relations, as frequently found in English. A main achievement of our approach lies in bringing computational lexical semantics and natural language generation closer together, so that the linguistic foundations of lexical choice in natural language generation are strengthened.

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  1. Helmut Horacek

    Present address: FB 14 Informatik, Universität des Saarlandes, Postfach 1150, D-66041, Saarbrücken, Germany

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  1. LILI-Fakultät, Universität Bielefeld, Postfach 100 131, D-33501, Bielefeld, Germany

    Helmut Horacek

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  1. Helmut Horacek
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Horacek, H. On expressing metonymic relations in multiple languages. Machine Translation 11, 109–158 (1996). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00349355

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