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A treatment of unbounded dependencies in eurotra with an experimental coindexation tool

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Machine Translation

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to present a treatment of unbounded dependencies which is currently being experimented with in Eurotra. The treatment is based on the coindexation tool designed by the authors as an extension to the E-Framework, Eurotra's NLP formalism.Footnote 1 At present, the tool has been tested in a systematic way in the Danish, French, Italian, and Spanish modules of the Eurotra translation system. Testing work on other languages (especially German) is in progress. Our article is organized as follows: in section 1, we discuss the linguistic and translational motivations for the treatment presented here; in section 2, we give the syntax and semantics of the two main components of the coindexation tool, namely the recursion markers and the copy operator; section 3 shows how this machinery can be applied for the implementation of unbounded dependency constructions according to our approach.

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Notes

  1. On the E-Framework, cf. Bech and Nygaard 1988, and Bech et al. (previous issue of this journal). A first extension to the framework, in terms of ‘recursion markers,’ was introduced by Allegranza (1988) and implemented in PROLOG by Giovanni Malnati. Allegranza and Bech (1989) integrated it with a structure-copying component due to Annelise Bech and Anders Nygaard.

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Allegranza, V., Bech, A. A treatment of unbounded dependencies in eurotra with an experimental coindexation tool. Machine Translation 6, 171–182 (1991). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00397280

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