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<Paper uid="C88-2161">
  <Title>The Proper Treatment of Quantification in</Title>
  <Section position="1" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="abstr">
    <SectionTitle>
Abstract
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> This approach has been developed in the context of the EUROTRA machine translation (MT) project and thus has been designed with respect to a syntax based stratificational translation process? We assume that in a semantic representation determiners are deleted and that their semantic function which is represented by semantic features is percolated into the mothernode. The semantic functions of determiners are explicated. The interaction between grammatical and lexical quantifieatiun is outlined. Ensemble theory is applied to the &amp;quot;count&amp;quot;/&amp;quot;mass&amp;quot; noun distinction. Transfer of quantification between German, English, and French is illustrated with respect to the &amp;quot;count&amp;quot;/&amp;quot;mass&amp;quot; distinction. The article closes with an outlook on \[he relevance of generalized quantifiers for Machine Translation.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1">  1. Semantic representation of determiners in EUROTRA  EUROTRA aims at defining a semantic representation which guarantees simple transfer between all European languages, that is, it should be &amp;quot;euroversal&amp;quot;. The concept of &amp;quot;euroversality&amp;quot; implies, amongst others, a semantic representation in a canonical form out or&amp;quot; which all European languages may be generated. With respect to this canonical form it is reasonable to delete the determiners during translation into the semantic representation and to represent their meaning by semantic features of the NP. This step may be motivated primarily by two facts:  (1) Languages vary with respect to the use of 0determiners. null (2) The set properties realized by an entity are  expressed differently in different languages.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> Tim idea that determiners are not deep structure constituents, but that their surface structure constituents have to be generated from a semantic representation is not new. It can already be found for example in PERLMUTTER 1970. Moreover, to represent the quantifier by means of semantic features of the NP implies that the entity which is focussed by the process of determination cannot be referred to directly, but only as the argument of the determiner which provides a new referent (cf. PINKAL 1986). BARWISE &amp; COOPER (1981) consider determiners as two-place predicates which take the noun which is the domain of quantification as one argument, and the rest of the sentence, which is the predicate quantified as the other argument. With respect to the EUROTRA MT system this has important implications for the translation between the syntactic dependency level - the EUROTRA Relational Structure (ERS) and the semantic level - the interface Structure (IS).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> Determiners which have the function of modifying nouns at ERS on the basis of several syntactic conditions establish different types of determination. Those types of determination are the ba,;is for deducing (i.e. translating) exactly that information which yields the new referent in the NP by unifying with the semantic features of the noun.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> Although both determiners and quantifiers have characteristic functions, they have others in common, so that a borderline is difficult to draw. Cases of crossclassification exist in many languages, as for example the one constituted by German der/ein/O, French le/un/O, English the/a/O (cf. VATER 1963). This is why we describe both determiners and quantifiers by a common set of semantic features.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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