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Systematic alternatives in lexicalization: The case of gerund translation

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Machine Translation

Abstract

The process of lexical choice usually consists of determining a single way of expressing a given content. In some cases such as gerund translation, however, there is no single solution; a choice must be made among several variants which differ in their syntactic behavior. Based on a bilingual corpus analysis, this paper explains first which factors influence the availability of variants. In a second step, some criteria for deciding on one or the other variant are discussed. It will be shown that the stylistic evaluation of the syntactic structures induced by alternative lexical items is of central importance in lexical choice. Finally, an implementation of the resulting model is described.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Computational Linguistics, Universität Duisburg, D-47048, Duisburg, Germany

    Stephan Mehl

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  1. Stephan Mehl
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Mehl, S. Systematic alternatives in lexicalization: The case of gerund translation. Machine Translation 11, 185–216 (1996). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00349357

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