Developing an interlingual translation lexicon using WordNets and Grammatical Framework
Paper in proceeding, 2014

The Grammatical Framework (GF) offers perfect translation between controlled subsets of natural languages. E.g., an abstract syntax for a set of sentences in school mathematics is the interlingua between the corresponding sentences in English and Hindi, say. GF “resource grammars” specify how to say something in English or Hindi; these are reused with “application grammars” that specify what can be said (mathematics, tourist phrases, etc.). More recent robust parsing and parse-tree disambiguation allow GF to parse arbitrary English text. We report here an experiment to linearise the resulting tree directly to other languages (e.g. Hindi, German, etc.), i.e., we use a language independent resource grammar as the interlingua. We focus particularly on the last part of the translation system, the interlingual lexicon and word sense disambiguation (WSD). We improved the quality of the wide coverage interlingual translation lexicon by using the Princeton and Universal WordNet data. We then integrated an existing WSD tool and replaced the usual GF style lexicons, which give one target word per source word, by the WordNet based lexicons. These new lexicons and WSD improve the quality of translation in most cases, as we show by examples. Both WordNets and WSD in general are well known, but this is the first use of these tools with GF.

WordNet

word sense disambiguation

Grammatical Framework

lexicons

Author

Shafqat Mumtaz Virk

University of Gothenburg

K V S Prasad

Chalmers, Computer Science and Engineering (Chalmers)

Aarne Ranta

University of Gothenburg

Krasimir Angelov

University of Gothenburg

Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on South and Southeast Asian Natural Language Processing


9781873769416 (ISBN)

Areas of Advance

Information and Communication Technology

Subject Categories

Language Technology (Computational Linguistics)

ISBN

9781873769416

More information

Latest update

1/10/2022