<?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes"?>
<Paper uid="W06-0111">
  <Title>Realization of the Chinese BA-construction in an English-Chinese Machine Translation System</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="abstr">
    <SectionTitle>
Abstract
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> The BA-construction refers to a special grammatical structure in Mandarin Chinese. It is an extremely important syntactic structure in Chinese, which is frequently used in daily life. The study of the BA-construction has attracted the attention of almost all linguists who are interested in this language. Yet it is a quite complex and difficult linguistic phenomenon and it is hard to analyze it satisfactorily to cope with the syntactic structure(s) of another language which does not possess this kind of construction (e.g. in machine translation). This paper discusses a few methods on how some of the English imperative sentences are realized by the Chinese BA-construction which is mandatory in transferring certain source language (SL) information into target language (TL) in an experimental machine translation (MT) system. We also introduce the basic syntactic structures of the BA-construction and explain how we formalize and control these structures to satisfy our need. Some features related to the BA-construction, such as obligatoriness versus the optionality, the semantics as well as the properties of the elements preceding and following the BA are also discussed. Finally we suggest that by constraining the variations of the formalized patterns of the BAconstruction, a better MT could be reached.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
class="xml-element"></Paper>