Anaphora and Translation Discrepancies in Russian–German MT

Abstract

Anaphora resolution in machine translation involves two aspects:(1) the identification of the antecedent, i.e., the determinationof co-reference relations between anaphor and antecedent; and (2)the translation of the anaphor, i.e., the selection of theappropriate target-language equivalent. The identification ofthe antecedent is essentially a monolingual, language-pairindependent problem which is usually solved during analysis. Theselection of the target-language equivalent, on the other hand,can be regarded as a language-pair dependent task which has to betackled during transfer and generation. In this paper, theproblems of anaphora translation are discussed for the languagepair Russian–German. Although in most cases source-languageanaphoric pronouns correspond to target-language anaphoricpronouns, in some cases this straightforward equation does nothold. Two cases of such translation discrepancies are treatedhere: zero anaphora and pronominal PPs. The differences in thedistribution of zero anaphora and pronominal PPs in Russian andGerman are described, and solutions to these translation problems basedon the Russian–German MT system T1 are presented.